Caché

A conventional psychological thriller, a social polemic, or a serious work of art. To fully realise even one of these is an achievement, but to realise all three in a single piece of cinema is remarkable indeed.

On the most obvious level, Hidden is a thriller which, in traditional European fashion, gets under your skin in spite of long shots when nothing happens (nevertheless, it is not for the squeamish). Also in typical European fashion, it requires a little more concentration and attention span than the average Hollywood offering to interpret and understand.

George (Daniel Auteuil) and Anne (Juliette Binoche) are a typical well-to-do Parisienne family. George is a TV chat show host for a literary discussion programme, his wife and young adolescent son are normal and easy to identify with. The acting is such that we see them as real people, almost as if in a documentary.

The couple are watching a video. We don't realise this at first. It's simply a video of the outside of their house, nothing more. Then the tell-tale lines on the screen appear as the video is rewound and the camera pans back. There is nothing threatening about the video except that they do not know who took it - it was just delivered on the doorstep. The exact point from which the video was shot is hard to ascertain.

Further videos arrive - still nothing threatening (the police refuse to do anything), but we can not only sense the couple's mounting panic, we are part of it. Nothing in Haneke's film so far justifies the sense of horror which we share with George and Anne but it is intense and very real. George tries to make connections from the clues so far. He feels extremely threatened. He accuses someone from his childhood. The accused is convincing in his protestations of innocence. In this climate of fear and reprisal things can only get worse.

On a second level, Hidden can be taken as both social comment on the tensions between bourgeois France and the ethnic Algerians that inhabit the poorer areas. France is unable to accept or own up to its guilt in its historic treatment of these large minorities, either in the past or the present. As a dynamic that is almost microcosmic, it reaches out to a wider world of have and have-nots, where those with power refuse to acknowledge faults because there is no-one to make them say sorry. This is conveyed in the film first from the typical settings, from wealthy modern areas to more pitiful suburbs, subtle overlays with background TV programs mentioning Iraq (British involvement, of course, not French), and the symbolic way the characters are presented enabling them to be easily transposed to analogous settings. It is a stark condemnation of how those with power (but also with suppressed guilt and a trigger-happy tendency to make accusations) cause much more damage than is necessary because of such shortcomings.

On the third level, as a work of art, Hidden is much more insidious. Director Haneke uses the camera as a tool between him and the audience in such a way that it is impossible to remain a passive, almost hidden viewer. The type of audience that the film will appeal to (educated, probably affluent) is also the one that will be most unsettled. Haneke is doing much more than telling a story - he is using the power of images to interact with his audience in a way that they are not fully aware of (until later analysis).

Then there is the question of who shot the tapes. If you really enjoyed the film but struggle with the answer (which is turns out to be different depending on whether you view it as a psychological thriller or as a polemic/work-of-art), you can go to the official website (which saves me revealing it!) - at which point you will probably want to watch it again to see the details you missed from inattention.

Hidden is a remarkably accomplished work. It is difficult to watch any scene and think of Binoche as Binoche (or Auteuil as Auteuil) rather than the character being played. In terms of directorial technique it will no doubt be an inspiration to film-makers for years to come. In terms of films that can alter the way we view the world it is first class - all the more so for the fact that its message is indirect (or hidden) rather than displayed ostentatiously and openly. Working out the superficial answer to the puzzle is all the more satisfying after piecing the clues together yourself. Working out the deeper sense, persuades by allowing the viewer to come to an undeniable realisation. Are ytou still paying attention? Don't fall asleep in this movie . . .

We are, yes, we're the ones who look without really seeing and Michael Heneke, the veteran young director knows it. Paranoia and responsibility in a film that is as irritating as it is brilliant. Even the opening credits, small writing while a camera, still, very still, stares at an upper, middle class abode. An intellectual Hitchcockian exercise by a genial director who seems, at times, is playing with himself. He probably is doing it knowing that we're looking and tests our endurance without caring, really, whether we're with him or against him. What he, I believe, wouldn't tolerate is our indifference but, there is no danger of that. Love and hate. Admiration and ridicule. He will inspire all of that, at the same time by some of us, all of us, one way or another. The performances are all wonderful and there is a marvelous moment with the great Annie Girardot.

If you've just seen "Cachê" and are still (understandably) in shock, not knowing whether you really liked it or not, let me ask you a few questions. Now, when was the last time a film:

a) had you glued to your seat as in "Caché", your eyes and neurones required to work in full gear from beginning to end, making it impossible to erase it out of your mind (instead of the instantly forgettable films you see every week), and actually making a second viewing almost compulsory?

b) posed such complex, multi-layered questions -- socio-political ones (the shameful, violent legacy of past and present imperialist nations, the manipulation of "reality" by the State and the media), existential ones (the racial, class and social prejudices that we all carry and have to fight within ourselves), and more prosaic ones, like trying to solve a complicated thriller? When were they so masterly interwoven?

c) made you aware that your explanation for the movie's most immediate, "practical" question (who's sending the tapes to Georges) will be influenced by your own background and prejudices?

d) had such a controversial and rich ending? (I could think of at least five possible denouements, even considering that I DID see the two boys -- q.v. the multiple theories about the ending in "Caché"'s message boards here in IMDb).

"Caché" is one of the few real masterpieces of the 2000s. The mix of socio-political comment with the thriller genre is not new, of course (you can go back at least to great German silent films by Lang, Murnau, Dieterle, Pabst). In 2005 alone, Cronenberg made the half-successful "A History of Violence", Spielberg the underachieved "Munich", Stephen Gaghan the overwrought "Syriana", Paul Haggis the soap-operatic "Crash". But Haneke asks us and gives us much more: he demands our ability to fill in the many important historical and political gaps, messes with our prejudices but respects our intelligence, and knows that a good part of us viewers are bored to death of being spoon-fed with one-digit I.Q. plots in mechanical thrillers inhabited by tired, phony "archetypes" of good x evil characters.

"Caché" is a monumental proof of Haneke's COMPLETE command of his craft. Artistic achievements like this are now SO rare in films that "Caché" feels like a happening -- a work of art that is mind-boggling, hypnotic and physically unnerving, ethically and esthetically disturbing, combining the sense of revelation and discomfort you get with the best political films with the braincells workout you get with the best thrillers.

As I left the theater, three masterpieces immediately came to my mind: Clouzot's "Le Corbeau" (a political statement disguised as a thriller and a probable inspiration for "Caché"), Antonioni's "The Passenger" (ditto, and also for the long, breathtaking, "open-meaning" last shot) and Resnais' "Marienbad" (the seminal film of multi-layered possible interpretations of "reality"). "Caché" stands tall on its own, reaffirming Haneke as one the top-5 working directors of the 2000s. Can't wait for his next film -- but while I do, I'll watch "Caché" one more time, and understand that hiding (Georges hiding his past and his feelings, nations hiding shameful parts of their history, Haneke hiding evidence, explanations and conclusions) can be a form of powerful revelation...and self-revelation.

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.

This was a very good film, an excellent study in psychological tension. Unfortunately, I don't think a lot of Americans or really anyone who isn't very familiar with the French-Algerian war will be able to understand it. It's about the horrors of that war and the French denial of their part in it -- very much tying in to the French youth race riots we saw last year. It also quietly draws some parallels with the war in Iraq. The ending was perhaps much too subtle. Everyone around me as we left the theater here in Los Angeles was expressing confusion. This was an older, more sophisticated audience, too. I don't think they really understood what was happening all along.

That said, it was still fantastic. I'm glad that at least outside of the U.S. it's gotten the recognition it deserves.