The movie Sofia Coppola wishes she’d never seen: “It’s really upsetting, it was just relentless”
We’ve all been there, watching a movie that we thought we were brave enough to stomach, only to find ourselves regretting that initial bite of confidence we had before pressing play.
As tension builds, gore increases, and the plot seems to be going places you’d once deemed unimaginable, there’s no going back – this is now a cinematic memory you’re going to have to live with forever.
Sofia Coppola might make films defined by overtly feminine aesthetics, her cinematic world most commonly occupying the world of the teenage girl, but don’t let this fool you – she’s no stranger to dark themes… I mean, the experience of coming of age as a teen girl can be incredibly painful and violent, just look at The Virgin Suicides, her 1999 debut, yet the filmmaker isn’t immune to finding certain movies that deal in dark themes too challenging; we all have our limits.
For the Marie Antoinette director, it was the classic Michael Haneke film Funny Games that left her traumatised, which she revealed during her recent trip to the Criterion Closet with her best friend, designer Marc Jacobs. The pair bonded over a shared sense of terror in regard to the film, mainly because, as Jacobs puts it, “I thought, ‘That could happen to me.’”
Released in 1997, Funny Games helped to propel the Austrian filmmaker towards a larger audience. While he wasn’t satisfied that enough Americans saw the film, leading him to remake it scene-for-scene 10 years later with an English-language cast (because he believed that Americans needed to hear the film’s message more than anyone), the film still fared well. Well, some people, like French director Jacques Rivette, hated it, but most critics could hardly deny the film’s impact (spoilers ahead).
I mean, here is a film that relentlessly torments us – the audience – as well as the characters. To do so, Haneke takes things that one step further and breaks the fourth wall. In one forgettable moment, a character picks up the TV remote and rewinds the scene we’ve just watched, as though the grisly murder we’ve just been subjected to will be reversed. Of course, in real life, that’s not possible, and Haneke plays with us. In the end, absolutely no one gets off scot-free.
The film’s premise is simple, but that’s what makes it so chilling – a family takes a trip to their holiday home, and soon they’re met with two young men in their all-white sports outfits, knocking on the door and asking if they can borrow a few eggs, and because the mother trusts these respectable-looking men, she lets them into her home, even though they’re strangers, which is her fatal flaw, because soon, they’ve incapacitated the father with a golf club and let themselves into the building, ready to begin their twisted gameplay.
The pair don’t stop until they’ve tormented and killed everyone, including the family’s young son, who does his best to try to escape his fate, but unfortunately, he’s shot in front of his parents, blood spattering the TV, and discussing the film, Coppola said, “That movie was so upsetting, I wish I’d never seen it.”
Picking up a copy of the film, she added, “We’re talking about this, but don’t watch it unless you want to be terrified, it’s really upsetting, it was just relentless. Evil. Yeah, that was terrifying” – if you’ve not watched Funny Games, I’d personally suggest ignoring Coppola’s advice, because it’s a terrific piece of filmmaking, even though you risk walking away from it a little traumatised.
