European Films

Most filmmakers do their utmost to make you forget that you are watching a film; Michael Haneke’s latest effort Caché (Hidden) does the opposite. The Austrian filmmaker-provocateur is not being clumsy – in fact, noticing that you are watching a carefully orchestrated construction reinforces the underlying ideas that make Caché so powerful. One of the film's themes is how we view things and how most of what we view has been mediated before it even reaches us. What Haneke tries to tell us is that the facts that are probably the most important ones for a complete understanding of any subject are probably being left out – just like the film’s own ending, which offers sort of a resolution of its thriller elements, but not really. Ironically, Haneke’s story cannot be understood completely, which is exactly what it is trying to say.

 

Georges (Daniel Auteuil) and Anne (Juliette Binoche) live an apparently happy bourgeois life with their 12-year-old swimming champion Pierrot (Lester Makedonsky). Their book- and VHS-lined lined Parisian apartment betrays both their good taste and their respectable jobs; Anne works for a publishing house and Georges presents a literary TV show. Their life is turned upside down when they receive a two-hour tape of their own home filmed from the outside: they are being watched. They do nothing until a second tape turns up which is again accompanied by a childlike horror drawing, but even then the police refuse to investigate because their is no clear threat. George and Anne become increasingly restless and their anxiety affects their marriage, laying bare a relationship in which petty lies reign supreme under a veneer of good bourgeois behaviour.

 

Georges might have an idea of who may be behind the tapes, someone whom he has hurt when he was six years old and whom he has not seen since. Is the past coming back to haunt him, and if so, can Georges be held responsible for what he did at that age? Haneke, who also wrote the screenplay, plays out the thriller elements with the ease of an experienced director but uses the modern cinematic equivalents of the Brechtian Verfremdungseffekt (rewinding film, unsynchronised sound/image, focus/out of focus) to underline his strong thematic undercurrents, focussing on first-third world relations (Georges' suspect is an immigrant from Algeria, an ex-colony of France) and the seeming impossibility of transmission of information without an agenda, hidden or in plain sight. The footage on the videotapes Georges and Anne receive and the footage of the actual Haneke film are so similar that is becomes hard to distinguish which is which, creating tension simply by asking the audience to continuously scrutinize every inch of celluloid for possible clues.

 

Haneke's characters’ frequent use of the expression “Et alors?” (which could be translated as either “And then?” or “And so?” asking for either causes or effects) point to a belief that causes and effects just keep accumulating over time to become an almost impenetrable mess. All the information that we receive through television, newspapers, books and even conversations with our family and friends is riddled with petty lies, hidden agendas and the skewed presentation of facts; they make it nary impossible to obtain any sense of objective truth. The result of this impossibility is that we are left with the unexplained effects of human behaviour, which more often than not create a bloody chaos of oppression, suppression and violence.

 

This dark world view comes elegantly wrapped in its own contradiction: if Caché is trying to say that we cannot completely understand anything because it has been mediated before it reaches us and I have thus "understood" the film, does that make its own statement invalid? Have I revealed what was hidden? Haneke is certain to fuel many post-film debates with this carefully orchestrated and very well-acted piece of work, which is unsettling in what it has to say about the real world, first-third world relations and the first world craving to have to make sense of it all -- but only just to the extent in which it can handle it. In the end, however, Caché also remains just a rewindable piece film. Or is that a contradiction too?

 

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