Review of Caché

by Roger Baldwin

Austrian-born writer-director Michael Haneke has, in Caché (Hidden), come up with a provocative and confounding gem designed equally perhaps to impress and frustrate its viewers. It's also one of the rare French films to take place in an entirely smoke-free environment. Here, an upper-middle-class professional family of three finds their comfortable, privileged lives disrupted by an anonymous stalker who calls them, mails them postcards with crude scrawlings of bleeding chickens and such and, most significantly, videotapes their home, leaving the evidence at their front door. Caché is something of a foreign-language Cape Fear, but with the menace less apparent and harder to identify.

Hidden sums up the movie's themes: hidden cameras violate the privacy of a TV literature talk-show host, Georges Laurent (Daniel Auteuil), who earns a living being watched by strangers and recorded for posterity; and his increasingly unnerved wife Anne (Juliette Binoche—watching beautiful French women ripen into middle age is reason enough to pay to keep the industry alive); hidden family secrets—she may or may not be having an affair which her sullen, approaching-puberty son Pierrot may or may not have discovered, we'll never know. At the story's core, Georges withholds information from Anne to mask a guilty childhood memory. Haneke enjoys concealing information from the audience (no one confesses to tormenting these people), he abhors resolution, through the final rolling credits he chalks up question marks—possibly as a deep statement on the ambiguous nature of documented truth, or as a grand joke on audiences, whose expectations about story closure are neatly torpedoed. In any case, by film's end, as I chuckled in bemused delight, much of the crowd in my theater was emitting gasps and murmurs—either of awe or bewilderment, others may have been rushing out to see what the critics made of it.

Caché, understandably, chronicles the nuclear-family conflict and deepening paranoia generated by unwanted surveillance. Though no threats are made, violence does not ensue, at no point is anyone in actual peril. The mere experience of being studied is an emotional rape. One disconnect between domestic product and European imports is pace and rhythm. So many American non-independent movies are more frenzied than our stereotyped, speeding-bullet lifestyles. This tale, with the exception of one shocking eruption, is unvarying in its measured, recessive telling, it's busy with immobile long shots and wordless stills. Caché recalls Francis Ford Coppola's The Conversation, I waited for properly-timed revelations, and am waiting still. But where that movie was a trenchant character study of Gene Hackman's Harry Caul—one in which the confining silences of an impenetrably-isolated, very private investigator were amplified by the conspiracy conventions of mid-70s political intrigue—this one is purposefully unfocused, it not only raises as many questions as it resolves, Haneke made me question what exactly his message was. Maybe it's a European thing. Maybe it's me.

Two initial scenes set up an open-endedness, each is extraordinarily long and unhappening. Until something happens. We see the facade of the Laurent home, a spacious, no-particular-point-of-view shot, one an amateur might frame, and I waited for the story to start, and watched and waited, until my popcorn was devoured and digested. Then we discover that we are, along with Georges and Anne, looking at one of the home-deposited videotapes, we're watching not just the movie, but a movie of the movie, we're watching them watch someone watch them. The same media-layered, audience-screen relationship was laid out with sharper clarity in Haneke's earlier, boldly-sadistic Funny Games. Here it's more of a deliberate cul de sac. The film's intelligence seems to lie in keeping the audience anticipating and off-balance. Its closing moments observe another apparently endless banal scenario in front of Pierrot's school steps; students come and go and go and come and go—a perfect capstone to the movie's enigmatic motif. Then you see a conversation, or maybe not, it's easy to miss, and it either deepens the story's mystery or raises a political analogy or is entirely and utterly gratuitous. It's all good.

Haneke said this movie is about how a person lives with guilt; the backdrop and the source of Georges' dirty secret centers on French culpability over atrocities committed in the early-1960s during the colonial Algerian war, their Vietnam (moreso even than their Vietnam). Critics have also commented that Haneke feels a righteous duty to expose the hypocrisy of the well-to-do—like some European film makers of a generation past, like Luis Buñuel or Jean-Luc Goddard. But sticking it to the mannered and cultured bourgeoisie may have more cachet on the class-conscious continent than it does here in the states; as might using the dying technology of VHS cassettes. I was more involved in the movie's moody shadings and sinister uncertainties than its political metaphors or personal soul-searching.

Haneke takes perverse delight in teasing audiences, in his disturbing themes and also in assaulting the familiarity and predictability we regularly find in popular entertainment. In messing with the rational sensibilities of the bourgeoisie. It works here, too.

Read about Caché in the Internet Movie Database

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