I don't normally screen calls from friends, but there was no way I was going to pick up this one. The voice on the answering machine the other night belonged to one of the most affable guys I know, but at that moment he was ranting up a storm. Apparently, he had just gotten wind of my admiration for a film called Caché, and he sounded like someone spoiling for a fight.
Strange as it might seem, this might not be an entirely inappropriate response to Caché — a film that, as with everything else by director Michael Haneke, plays ping-pong with our heads while confronting our appetite for violence.
In movie after movie — from Benny's Video to Funny Games to The Piano Teacher to Code Unknown — Haneke burrows straight into the heart of human darkness and throws our own worst fears right back in our faces. Disquietingly ambiguous and uncompromising, these are films that are both cerebral and painfully visceral and, to an extent, they elicit responses in kind. They are movies to ponder and movies to be repulsed by as they cast their uncomfortably intimate light on our most unsavory and self-destructive impulses.
The violence that abounds in Haneke's films takes many forms and is never far from the surface. Caché (which translates, appropriately enough, as Hidden) adds a political dimension to the mix, tracing the real-world roots and ramifications of its on-screen abuses, implicating its characters and audience alike in a web of collective guilt even as it blurs the distinctions between the physical and the metaphysical. In the end, viewers may struggle with a movie that seems to be positing a manifesto of original sin as conceived by an agnostic.
Caché opens with a long, static shot of a perfectly ordinary, perfectly serene residential neighborhood on the outskirts of Paris. The shot seems to go on forever and not much of anything appears to be happening — until the filmmaker finally pulls the rug out from under us and reveals that everything we think we've been watching is a lie. The image turns out to be a film within the film, a stalker's video of a couple's home that has been sent to the couple in question, apparently just to let them know that they're being watched.
That same endless, motionless shot of this quiet, anonymous street repeats later in the film, and what we initially perceive as purely mundane becomes unmistakably ominous — a feeling amplified as more tapes continue to arrive at the couple's doorstep, some accompanied by crude, childlike drawings of faces with blood spewing from their mouths.
No demands are made, no elaborate blackmail schemes hatched, and virtually none of the traditional components of the thriller genre, psychological or otherwise, manifest themselves — leaving the increasingly beleaguered couple, Georges (Daniel Auteuil) and Anne (Juliette Binoche), plenty of time to bicker between themselves about what the tapes mean, who might be sending them and what to do about it.
That ambiguity and uncertainty drives everything in Caché, with virtually the entire film unfolding as a devastating waiting game for something that may or not happen. (Haneke has a Carly Simon-esque appreciation for the awful pleasures of anticipation.)
As Georges and Anne drive themselves crazy trying to figure out how to deal with the terrible uncertainties of their situation, we watch as their cultivated and well-fortified world deteriorates into chaos. Haneke makes much of the couple's well-appointed, book-lined townhouse with its imposing metal door and sturdy stone walls, but the implication is that neither brute strength nor the niceties of civilization can stave off the barbarians at the gates. The outcome may be up in the air, but the message in Caché is clear — don't bother seeking safety, because safety does not exist.
As you've probably gathered by now, what Caché is really about is life in the age of terror — an anti-thriller in which Georges and Anne soon find themselves paralyzed by their own apprehensions, scared to leave their ivory tower of fractured domesticity, never knowing when the other shoe will drop.
Haneke drives his metaphor home by periodically directing our attention to television sets in the corners of his scenes from whence flow a series of images of angry insurgents in Iraq and elsewhere. And just in case we still haven't gotten the point, Georges eventually comes to believe that the person sending the menacing videos is a dimly remembered acquaintance from his past — an Arab man who, as it happens, was once done a major injustice by Georges' family.
The Arab in Caché is no more just an Arab than was the Arab in Camus' The Stranger, of course — the movie presents him as a sort of universal outsider who becomes our conduit into a world of trauma (and when there are no more outsiders available, the film seems to say, we simply resort to punishing ourselves).
Still, it's clear that Haneke (an Austrian now based in France) subtly implicates France's tortured relationship to its Arab-Muslim population in crafting Caché's metaphors, drawing specifically on his adopted country's collective guilt over the Algerian War. The sins of the fathers come back to haunt the sons in Caché and recycle themselves indefinitely.
But the film has bigger and less literal things on its mind than specific clashes of culture. As in all of Haneke's movies, the real dangers in Caché lurk within, terrors of the imagination that prove every bit as potent as the actual terrors on the ground. Ultimately, Caché isn't concerned with the possibility of getting whacked by shoe-bombers or the price of oil or even with solving the mystery of its unseen stalker. The whole point of this mystery is that there is no point. And if just the thought of that lack of resolution sets your eyeballs spinning in their sockets, then you might want to consider something a tad more digestible such as Firewall or Final Destination 3, both currently taking up space at a megaplex near you.
As for Caché, Haneke keeps things open-ended right up until the bitter end and beyond, allowing meticulously accumulated tensions to boil over into some nameless, endless state of existential dread, and the rest is silence. Except for those midnight phone calls from irate friends.
This article appears in Feb 15-21, 2006.