| Review |
Austrian writer-director Michael Haneke, who’s made some remarkable pictures over the past few years--particularly “The Piano Teacher,” an astonishing work in a whole variety of ways--impresses again as one of the most intriguing of contemporary filmmakers with this moody, unsettling psychological thriller. “Cache,” which translates as “Hidden,” generates enormous tension and suspense simply as a tale of a seemingly ordinary Parisian family stalked by a mysterious person who videotapes their day-to-day activities and delivers the resultant cassettes to their doorstep, with crude, vaguely threatening drawings attached. But though on this level Haneke demonstrates an almost Hitchcockian genre sensitivity--you might think the picture a sort of reverse “Rear Window” in which the voyeur’s intentions are anything but benign and the watched party is clearly a victim--the film takes on even more unnerving tone when a socio-political subtext is added to the mix in terms of French attitudes to African immigrants, the tragedies to which they’ve sometimes led, and their lingering effects. Had this ethnic component been added to the script in a cheap, exploitative fashion (as might have been the case in a standard American product--watch out for the inevitable remake), it would have made for a very unsavory brew. Here, though, the indignation is strictly controlled, and the result is a picture whose sense of menace and guilt is enhanced rather than diluted by it. And while the studiously ambiguous close will probably frustrate some viewers, the open-endedness is actually a commentary on the fact that the historical problems Haneke’s film raises subtly in genre terms remain a very real fact of European life.
Daniel Auteuil stars as Georges Laurent, an intellectual fellow who serves as the host of a television inteview program dealing with books. He enjoys a happy, if somewhat reserved, home life with wife Anne (Juliette Binoche), who works in publishing, and son Pierrot (Lester Makedonsky), and a stimulating relationship with friends. It’s a seemingly stable, secure existence that’s suddenly threatened when the tapes begin to arrive and the police--much to Georges’ distress--are unable to do anything to help. It becomes clear that he suspects the harassment might have something to do with an incident in his youth, and, more and more distraught, he tries to track down the perpetrator by traveling to his childhood home to talk with his aged mother (Annie Girardot) and following up on clues he finds in the tapes themselves. His investigations ultimately bring him into touch with a man named Majid (Maurice Benichou), whom he knew many years before, and the man’s son (Walid Afkir)--and force him to confront a troubling, long-buried secret.
It’s actually quite a simple story, but Haneke imbues even seemingly ordinary moments with a feeling of vague dread, and he subverts your expectations repeatedly--and pleasurably. He inserts a prolonged episode involving Pierrot’s disappearance, for example, which turns out very differently from the way it would end in a Hollywood movie: you may feel puzzled and blindsided, but you’ll also have to admit that Haneke’s tactic has worked. Similarly, many viewers will find the final sequence unsatisfying: like the film as a whole, it doesn’t offer easy answers, and the unwonted ambiguity in a thriller may at first annoy you. But it makes one’s recollection of the picture as unsettling as the experience of watching it; it sticks with you and may well force you to reconsider the preconceptions you bring with you. Auteuil and Binoche give subtle, incisive performances, with the former particularly memorable both as a man driven by a recollection he’s tried to suppress and as a symbol of a society that reacts ferociously when those who consider themselves its victims finally express indignation at their treatment. (The film obviously has a political agenda dictated by current events, but successfully folds it into a compelling intimate story.) The rest of the cast offer admirably understated support, with Benichou and young Makedonsky making especially telling impressions. Christian Berger’s naturalistic cinematography and Michael Hudecek’s skillful editing effortlessly complement Haneke’s reserved but tense approach.
“Cache” may be seen as a modern counterpart to one of the best French thrillers ever made, Henri-Georges Clouzot’s “Le Corbeau” (1943), about a French village torn apart by a series of poison-pen letters. That film was controversial in its day, not only because it was financed by German occupying powers but was taken as anti-French; but it can also be interpreted as a veiled commentary on the effect of that occupation on the French character. And it too conveyed brilliantly, though in a swifter, more brutal fashion than Haneke’s picture does, the insidious, even shattering toll that anonymous accusations can take on ostensibly ordinary, innocent people. The two films are very different specimens, but both compellingly scratch at the sinister realities that often lie beneath the most placid and seemingly unthreatening of surfaces. (David Cronenberg’s “A History of Violence” has more recently taken up the same theme, with equally powerful result.) It’s not an uncommon thriller element, of course, but when treated as remarkably as it was by Clouzot and Cronenberg--and as it is here by Haneke--it never fails to have an impact. “Cache” joins a line of distinguished thrillers–add Carol Reed’s “The Third Man” to those already mentioned--that are more than just thrillers, and proves their equal. |
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