If you feel like having a movie pull your toenails out with a pair of rusty pliers this week, you’re in luck - you get to choose between Michael Haneke’s shot-by-shot remake of his Funny Games and Christian Mungiu’s 4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days. Both are impressively violent, nearly unwatchable, and superbly directed.
I haven’t seen the new version of Funny Games, but I’m told that it’s virtually interchangeable with the ten-year old Austrian original. It’s a realistic but tongue-in-cheek depiction of a highly unrealistic home invasion and torture of a middle-class family by two hyper-stylized psychopaths.
4 Months, 3 Weeks… Yada Yada (the title still annoys me) is about a college student helping her roommate get an illegal abortion in scary-ass 1980s Communist Romania. The setting is claustrophobic, Kafkaesque, and miserable; the story (and the characters) are depressing and despicable.
Both movies feature heaping spoonfuls of verbal, psychological, and institutional abuse. Funny Games adds (mostly implied) physical violence, and 4 Months brings multiple rape and viscera to the game.
I hated 4 Months. It’s a marvelously directed, acted, and shot film, rich with that rock-solid European composition and feel for the moment. It wouldn’t matter, however, if Jesus or Superman put it together - I would still hate it, because it doesn’t want to be liked in any way. The abuse it put me through was unrelenting and thorough. The two women battle issues of class, family, privacy, trust, rights, safety, and the weight of it all is put squarely on the viewer’s shoulders. The point at which this movie stopped telling me something about wrongs and started doing them to me was when it rubbed an extreme close-up of a freshly aborted fetus in my face. I neither needed that, nor learned anything from it.
I’m finding it entertaining that 4 Months received consistent praise from the likes of The New York Times and Slate, while Funny Games got a mere acknowledgment of competence, with laments about its viewer-antagonizing premise. The former was clearly a more disturbing movie in my view - and more needlessly so. By “need” I mean the ultimate effect or point of the work. Funny Games wants to convey a simple idea: that violence in popular entertainment shouldn’t be acceptable or, well, entertaining. To do that, Haneke chooses to actually show said violence, and the irony is not lost on him. It may not be an earth-shattering goal, but it’s clear (quote): “I give back to violence that which it is: pain, a violation of others.”
This worked on me, in the sense that even though my first reaction to the ending of Funny Games was “well, I’m never seeing that again,” I did reconsider how I think about violence as entertainment. Here and now, though, I can’t say I walked out of 4 Months with any sort of message or point.
There are some obvious ones you could call out: “abortion is bad.” “Communism is bad.” “Some people are dicks.” “Under Communism, many people are dicks.” But I’m not particularly impressed by any of this. On top of that, much of the abuse here is gratuitous, in the sense that the sole purpose is to shock. If the point is a condemnation of totalitarian regimes, why that fetus shot? You could cause the same disgust by showing an abortion done by a real surgeon, legally, in a democratic, first-world hospital. If the point is to condemn abortion, why is the protagonist swimming in a corrupt, mad sea of nosey assholes? If it’s both, or if Mungiu just wants to show a generally fubar-ed situation, how are we supposed to feel anything but frustration and contempt without a real target?
It’s never bad to measure a movie by how it made you think (in addition to how it made you feel, which can be easier and cheaper to MacGyver). Funny Games’ meta-jokes (the psychopaths address the camera, talk about the plot, and even rewind the movie) aren’t shockingly original or ingenious, but they are (bitter) food for thought. 4 Months is more of an emetic.
