Caché (2005) Reviews

• Seek out the hidden

  poppedculture2006-01-28

  Perhaps you will attend Caché to see what all the buzz is about. You will be disappointed. This is not a film to be enjoyed. It is not meant to entertain you. You should at some point in the film be confused, even angered, by what is happening. But you will think about it. A lot. Maybe, you'll start by thinking about the puzzling plot. You'll float a few theories about whodunit, may be even with the caveat, "not that it matters with such unlikeable characters." Then, in your search for answers, you might read comments like the one you're reading right now. You might read a review or two. You probably won't find the answer you're looking for, or maybe you'll find many answers. The point is that in searching for a resolution to complete the narrative, you will have gone over the clues over and over, replaying each scene in your head for meaning. You might even go back and watch the film again in the theatre. Now ask yourself honestly, whether you say you loved the film or hated it, how many films have had this kind of effect on you? It might irritate you that a film seemingly so simple has more effect on your memory than even your favourite films. For this, Caché deserves credit. Because in forcing you to question every frame, it has advanced its themes far more effectively than more traditional narratives. You will never forget that France and Algeria have a dark past. You will never forget how the terror the couple feels tears at the root of what they hold dear, and in doing so changes them into unsympathetic characters. That may not make for two hours of thrills, but it should get people to think about these issues. The real point the movie seems to be making is that in our rush to find clues to complete a narrative, we sometimes lose sight of what's going on. The director here turns us all into sleuths, scanning the foregrounds and backgrounds, by locking off the camera and not guiding us as to what to look at. (In this way, he makes us watch in the same way an autistic person would watch the film.) We're so wrapped up in this alleged mystery that we hardly question the motives of the alleged heroes. Is videotaping a home really terrorizing? After all, people videotape the kids' swim race. Where do these videotapes cross the line? No one is ever threatened or harmed by them. Rather it is the paranoia of the TV host, a person who deals in the editing and manipulation of images for a living, which lead him into following these leads. It is in his nature to mistrust the images. It is in his psyche to follow these tapes and the places they lead him. The farther he follows them, the farther his subconscious burdens him. His mother says she hardly remembers these incidents, but Georges has nightmares about them and constructs grand conspiracy theories about them. Yet when he confronts his childhood nemesis, Majid seems not to know anything of these tapes and is seen crying after Georges leaves. Georges is the one terrorizing him instead of telling him how guilty he feels, which would make him a lot happier. Majid subsequently does something even more shocking. So who's terrorizing whom? As hard as it may be, try to think outside the post-9/11 paradigm and just analyze the facts. The more you do this you will see that Georges is the architect of his own demise. He is not responsible for Majid's horrible actions, but he is responsible for not communicating his guilt with anyone, which might have prevented many of the events.

• Haneke doesn't care much about the plot - in fact he cares about YOU

  v-schwarz2005-12-30

  Let me just give you some maybe provoking thoughts of mine: Caché certainly is not a film for everyone. We all know it is not a film that is shown in the big multiplex cinemas but only in small ones with "special" audiences. Haneke knows pretty well which type of people will be watching his film. His image of them (us) is one of well-educated people who would never consider themselves to be xenophobic or even racist. He thinks of his audience to consist mainly of politically liberal people, people who probably disagree with the current political tendency to keep strangers out of our "western" countries. People who don't agree with closing the frontiers of Europe, the USA and of Australia to emigrants and even refugees. Moreover, Haneke considers his audience to generally like arts and culture, just like Georges and Anne do. He considers us to be people of vaguely the same class as his protagonists with similar interests. Caché's message is not about the stalking-plot. It is about just these people, about Georges and Anne, but also about Caché's audience, about us. Remember that scene early in the film when Georges almost gets into a fight with the guy on a bike? The man was black and Haneke certainly didn't pick a black actor by chance. You won't hear any racist insult or something like that during the film, no, of course not. Georges is not that kind of rude and abusive person. In fact he would never even admit he is every well noticing someone else's colour of skin. But of course he does, he simply can't avoid it (like we all can't). Does the fact his opponent in that scene is black change his behaviour (which is absolutely aggressive)? Georges would deny that by all means, so would we. Can we be sure? Remember the last scene of the film, taken in front of the main stairs of Pierrot's school? It is shot in a way that will prevent you from getting a good view over what is happening easily. You are suddenly confronted with these stairs and lots of people on them, you just can't give everyone a look here fast, they are just too many. As you will have noticed, after 5 - 10 seconds Wajid's son is showing up, walking over the stairs slowly from the lower right corner of the screen to the upper left one and takes Pierrot down to the bottom of the screen to talk to him for a minute (we can't hear the dialogue of course). At what point did you notice Wajid's son during that sequence? When he started talking to Pierrot? When he walked his way up the stairs? Even earlier, when he entered the screen? If so, why did your eyes pick him among these 20-30 people moving up and down these stairs, leaving and entering the screens? Why him and not any other of the white persons on screen? Caché is also about our visual perception. Our eyes DO make a difference, no matter what our conscience and our brains are telling them. What Caché taught me is that we just can't escape our eyes and the mechanisms behind them. At least I caught myself during that last scene for what my eyes did. I guess Haneke knows very well that the kind of social "liberalism" I described above might just be pretended and untrue in many cases. He does not like his protagonist Georges, he definitely doesn't create sympathetic feelings within the audience for him. He's shown as a generally cold and arrogant person. Haneke doesn't like the audience either however. We are hit by many violent cuts and sharp and sudden dark / bright contrasts during the film. Haneke dislikes both Georges and us for the wrong image we have of ourselves. The fact that he does it with his very subtle and minimalistic style instead of adding to the "liberals-bashing" committed by right-wing conservatives these days is raising my respect for the director even more. Outstanding work, Monsieur Haneke!

• Reflective probing of hidden guilt, but definitely not top-notch cinema

  JuguAbraham2005-12-13

  Michael Haneke's film begins as a clinical, psychological and social study of a respectable individual in European society. It ends as a study of a larger contemporary European segment of its population. It reminds one of the early works of Fassbinder—only Haneke's production values are more sophisticated. The camera becomes a character—a major one at that. This reminds the viewer that he is watching cinema at several junctures and that s/he is part of the communication/entertainment process. It makes you constantly ponder if the cinema you are watching is providing truth or lies (or something in between) 24 frames per second. The fixed-medium range shots that opens and closes the film indicate the view and mood of the director--clinical, somewhat distanced and unshaken by the story he unfolds. We also notice that what we are seeing, might not be what we think we are seeing. Antonioni did this to us in "Blow up" several decades ago. After the screening at the on-going Dubai film festival, I was amused at the director carefully distancing himself from a situation where he could have resolved the issues—-he prefers to leave it to the viewer to do so. In a way the entertainment continues after the screening if you choose to reflect on what you saw. At the obvious level, it is a study of colonial guilt of Europe and race relations. At a deeper level, it probes complacency and bourgeois temperaments of the financially secure classes in society. Escape from reality comes from closing curtains, shutting off the outside world and consuming sleeping tablets. At another level, the film explores the attitudes of three distinct generations towards social relationships. Haneke uses graphic shocking violent scenes to jolt the audiences when they least expect it. He seems to enjoy the process. His strength is not in his cinema (Kubrick, in comparison, was brilliant at this game). Hanneke's strength lies elsewhere—eliciting fascinating performances from his cast. Daniel Auteuil, Julliette Binoche, Maurice Benichou and Annie Girardot were simply fascinating to watch. The strength of the film lies in the subject that will disturb anyone. Many of us have something in our past that we wish to hide or not discuss. Yet there is a conscience in us that nags us to believe that there was a witness to that wrongdoing--a witness who cannot be buttonholed. It is this psychological fact that makes the film tick, much less its cinematic flourish.

• Disturbing, Stunning, Daring and Dark

  jasongrimshaw2005-05-16

  Michael Haneke the austere Austrian director of such critically acclaimed films as "Funny Games", "Code Unknown" and "The Piano Teacher" has created in "Caché" (Hidden) his finest film to date. Starring Daniel Auteuil and Juliette Binoche the film is a taut and tense personal thriller, which examines important subjects such as guilt and responsibility in the context of western comfort. Georges and Anne are a happily married middle class couple who both work in the arts. The balance of their lives is suddenly disturbed when they begin to receive video cassettes seemingly surveying the exterior of their home. Anne is quite dismissive of the tape but immediately Georges believes there is a sinister element to the tape. Soon they receive more tapes and disturbing drawings. As Georges fears for the safety of his family he suddenly has to confront his past and allow his wife to learn the hidden secrets of his past. Haneke's film plays on one level like a common thriller, but it has much deeper psychological echoes as the "hero" George is revealed not to be quite the upstanding family man his family believed him to be. As his wife struggles to come to terms with the revelations their entire comfortable existence disintegrates. Haneke is not just interested in creating a thriller however and the auteur expertly dissects George and Annes bourgeois life and implicates them both in the treatment by western culture of the east and the third world. Acting in the film is terrific. Daniel Auteuil is simply excellent in his role, the actor manages to explore his character enough to make us forget it is a portrayal. Juliette Binoche as his wife initially seems not to be at the center of the film, but the stunning actress manages to place herself at the emotional center of the film as the wife and mother. Expert supporting roles are provided by Maurice Benichiou, Annie Girardot and Nathalie Richard among others. "Caché" is at once an intriguing thriller and a wonderful examination of guilt and responsibility in a very modern context.

• A thriller about social responsibility: Haneke in top form

  Chris Knipp2005-11-17

  The title of this engrossing and disturbing new Haneke film is ironic. At the end of the film, Georges Laurent (Daniel Auteuil) tells his wife Anne (Juliette Binoche) that he will be "caché," hidden, and he takes off his clothes, closes the curtains, and buries himself in bed. It's afternoon. But he will be exposed, as before. "Caché" is about how you can't hide. Auteuil, an actor who naturally looks worried and put-upon, and Binoche, who has a vulnerable and frightened look, play a privileged couple whose son Pierrot (Lester Makedonsky) at twelve is a star swimmer. Georges has a literary TV program (like "Le Bouillon de la Culture"), which, in France, makes him a star. They have a beautiful house in an elegant suburb of Paris. (His childhood home, we learn, was a substantial farm.) Beyond all that are the poor outskirts on the periphery of the French capital, the slums, the projects, the "banlieux," with their Arabs and blacks, French society's underprivileged and mistreated, unemployed and ignored, a population ready to explode into revolt -- as it very dramatically did in November 2005. Like Haneke's previous "Code Unknown," "Caché" is primarily about alienation and connection. This sounds theoretical and intellectual, but the uncompromising Austrian who now makes his films in French always finds a deep emotional core in his people, in this case a core of the most infinite desperation in both perpetrator and victim. "Code Unknown" focused on chance meetings. "Caché" moves in closer to home, to this family whose peace is shattered and to another family that has never had peace. As the film begins the foreground family begins to receive increasingly menacing videos left on their doorstep that show they are being watched. Georges thinks he knows who it is. "Caché" blends urban angst with the primal horror of Greek tragedy. What goes around comes around. For what he has explained was his starting point for the film, Haneke elliptically refers within it to the story of hundreds of Algerians the French cast into the Seine in 1961, a story recently unearthed and hitherto largely ignored. Within the film's foreground we discover that as a youth Georges himself betrayed an Algerian playmate in a way that effectively ruined his life. But the events that unfold are full of mystery and foreboding, and the relation between the Algerian, Majid (Maurice Bénichou), and Georges' current terror and disquiet largely remains uncertain. Is this a thriller? Maybe: it has a thriller's progressive unease, the suspense and pulse -- up to the end, anyway -- of a good whodunit. But Haneke, a great director in fine form here, has produced something as intellectually challenging as it is emotionally troubling. He operates without the help of surging background music, jump cuts, or snappy chases. And as the final credits roll, the closing long shot (upon which we are again voyeurs, as when the film began), shows us that nothing is resolved. A highly original artist, Haneke continues to explore. Seen during its Paris run in October 2005. Shown first in the US at the New York and Chicago Film Festivals in October 2005. Opening in NYC and LA (US release title "Hidden") December 2005, limited US release January 2006. This is a highly visual film and should be seen if possible on a big screen.