Caché

An old Monty Python sketch featured the Society for Putting Things on Top of Other Things, who in the course of a few minutes come to realize that their entire reason for existing is very silly and inconsequential. At the end of the sketch, the characters find themselves unable to leave the room.

"I have just discovered, gentlemen," Graham Chapman announces as club president, "that this entire room is surrounded by film."

It's a typical self-referential meta-Python moment. Of course the room is surrounded by film. We in the audience continue to watch them. The only way for the "characters" to be free of their burden is if we in the audience move on to the next piece (which, a moment later, we do via a Terry Gilliam animation segment).

That entire scene lasts maybe five minutes, and that includes a lot of goofy banter about placing things on top of other things. Michel Haneke takes about 2 hours to make essentially the same point, albeit on a grander scale and with a strong sense of 20th Century French History. It's not a bad film by any means, and much about Haneke's subtle technique is quite clever and sly. But in making his most easily accessible film to date, Haneke's definitely sacrificed some of the depth of films like The Piano Teacher and Code Unknown.



First things first...I don't think the central mystery of Caché actually has a solution, at least within the reality of the movie. We are presented some bits and pieces of evidence that, in a conventional film, would add up to some kind of logical pattern, but no matter how you approach them, they just don't fit together properly.

The film opens with a static shot, what looks like a surveillance shot, of a house. We back up to discover that this is not merely the first shot of Haneke's film, but is a videotape being viewed by Georges and Anne Laurent (Daniel Autiel and Juliette Binoche), the couple who live in the house with their 12 year old son Pierrot (Lester Makedonsky). The only other clue provided is a crudely sketched, vaguely threatening drawing.

Right away, a few things become obvious. The man or woman making these tapes has some kind of supernatural abilities. He or she can sneak around Autiel while he is inspecting his front porch, leaving a tape and drawing for him in the door jamb without making a sound. He or she can stand on the street filming people without ever once being noticed. Finally, the cameraperson knows things about Georges' past, things almost no one else would be in a position to know. (There are many possible reasons for the title Caché, which means "hidden" in French, but I think it probably refers to the camera. It's always present, and its presence comes to dominate the movie, but it's never seen.)

Eventually, the surveillance will cause Georges and Anne to have mini nervous breakdowns. Georges, in the course of investigating the strange tape phenomenon, is forced to confront an ugly situation from his childhood, in which he wronged an orphaned Algerian boy. His paranoia and secrecy leads Anne to question the nature of their marital bond, and possibly even drives her into the arms of a family friend, Pierre (Daniel Duval). And what to make of the son, Pierrot? He runs away one night, seems bitterly angry with his parents for some reason, but never has any of his various issues or concerns resolved in the course of the film.

And then there's that last shot, a tricky little parting shot that seems to throw everything else in the film into question. In yet another static surveillance shot, this time outside a school building,
Haneke places a student front and center in the frame. Out of habit, we focus our eyes on this figure, even though they have no special significance. And all this time, in the upper left hand corner of the frame, odd meetings are taking place between characters who have no business even knowing one another.

I don't neccessarily think that this conversation right at the end changes anything, per se. As I said, the whole thing's too ridciulous to solve conventionally. I don't think there is a rational solution to who's making the tapes. (It's just not even possible, when you get right down to it.) But it gets back to what seems to be Haneke's larger concern, which is picking apart the psychological impulses at play when we watch movies. As in his previous features Funny Games and Benny's Video, Haneke gets at the nature of voyeurism and expectation. We watch films because we want to see things happen, and when they don't happen or they happen in a way we don't expect, our reactions can be extraordinarily telling.

For example, in the film, Georges hosts a weekly TV chat show about books. We cut early on to a shot of him filming the program. He says his farewell speech into the camera and then begins to talk with the other people on the panel with him, in the way all TV hosts do when they sign off at the end of the program. The difference is, we're watching a film, and yet we still don't get to hear the sound of what's being said on stage. Georges says his goodbye, the camera backs up, and we're in the same position as a TV viewer, seeing these people on stage address one another silently (presumably while credits would be rolling for a real TV viewer).

You notice this in watching the film. "Hey, why don't I get to hear what they're saying! I'm not watching this stupid book show, but a movie about Georges!" You feel entitled to this information as a viewer of the film...As a moviegoer, you grow accustomed to omnipotence.

I think it's safe to say that Haneke has inserted himself into this particular movie, that he's the one making the tapes. After all, many of his shots in the film that aren't actually sent to the Laurents as tapes are nonetheless shot in the same fashion. (One, in which we view an unpleasant memory from Georges' past, looks just like the surveillance shots but couldn't have been filmed without a time machine.) Often, it's hard to even tell if you're seeing surveillance video or just an establishing shot leading into the next scene.

But to put the point more poetically...Haneke has created this universe, and he created this issue in Georges' past, and he decided that it needed to be resolved for any of these characters to move forward. So he's then the author of the tapes, if only because, in this world, they needed to exist for these people to get together, for this incident to even be remembered.

When you figure in the French atrocities against the Algerians in a larger context, documented in the amazing and extremely timely film The Battle of Algiers, the movie takes on a strong political subtext. Could this really be more about a director trying to urge a nation towards confronting its past, taking the form of a movie about a mysterious stranger urging a man to face his childhood wrongdoing?

Okay, so that's all solid, thoughtful stuff and it's all in this film. And yet, I'm just not totally blown away. Really, it feels like an interesting synthesis of ideas already played out in the movies of Hitchcock, Lynch and Antonioni.

(David Lynch's Lost Highway was clearly a starting point for Haneke, providing both the starting premise - a couple receiving odd video tapes of their home in the mail - and the name Laurent, which was the name of Robert Loggia's character.)

It does, after a certain point, begin to kind of feel like film school wankery. Yes, it's so sly, implicating us in the audience by toying with our natural curiosity. But it's also kind of annoying. A small part of me, the part that favors relatable human stories as opposed to post-modern narrative experimentation, almost feels like Haneke's using these concepts as a crutch. Rather than have to do the emotional heavy-lifting of showing Anne and Georges' marriage falling apart, rather than exploring the genuine trauma that might have led to Pierrot's sullen attitude and angst, Haneke just dips into the Lacanian bag of tricks and emerges with a self-referential little mindfuck of a movie that seeks to confound and even frustrate as much as enlighten or entertain.

Monty Python managed to do that, plus get in a few boob jokes, make fun of the Scottish, reference Proust and still have time left over for Gilliam animations and guys in suits of armor hitting one another on the head with rubber chickens.