Film Review ..CACHE..(Hidden), ....by Timo Francis

Haneke, M. (2006) Cache, (Hidden)

This film starring Daniel Auteuil, as Georges Laurent, and Juliette Binoche, as Anne Laurent, is a very tense personal thriller encompassing guilt and responsibility in the heart of Western consciousness and you soon forget the subtitles as proved by passing the £1 million pound British box office receipts.

The director is not just interested in creating a thriller; he uses a premise of a Parisian married couple, with the husband finally having to reveal a hidden episode in his childhood, but with an allegory of guilt of France’s colonial past interwoven in the fabric of the story.

The husband and wife are middle-aged successful literary professionals, one a television talk show host and the other one an editor in a publishing house.    They host dinner party for well-educated attractive friends. 

They are slowly being terrorised by a series of surveillance video tapes left on their front porch; to start with, seemingly innocent shots of the outside of their house from a hidden camera.

The genius of this film is the use of the unpanned extended shots of what the hidden camera sees, but we do not see it or actually find out who is behind the lens, which makes the audience question about memory and what has passed. 

The acting in the film is simply excellent depicting as often in life nothing happening at all.  This nothingness is almost maddening, but there is a menace lurking and threatens throughout the film.  The increase in the tension between the two main characters is palpable.  Their seemingly bourgeois blissful life is eventually torn apart as the mystery of the past unravels.

The Laurents grow more and more frightened; the same is true for the audience who finds itself in a position similar to that of the wife, who is kept in the dark by her husband and does not know the whole story that Georges does not want to reveal.  Evidently, we discover the traumatic event that happened during Georges’ childhood to the detriment of his little Algerian friend, Majid, (Maurice Bénichou).  This leads to the gradual realisation that the Algerian narrative woven into the film is a personalisation of France’s dirty little secret with the Algerian war. 

The shocking scene later in the film with the grown Majid reveals the depth of the emotions and the trauma of Georges’ cruelty towards him, leading us through an accelerated ordeal.  Haneke raises questions of guilt and responsibility that have global implications.  Yet he never gets distracted from the business of building suspense, using long takes, no background music and expressing emotional upheaval with simple camera work throughout the film.

The director is definitively and subversively playing with the viewers’ expectations of cinematic endings concerning thriller mystery genres.  With Caché (Hidden) the audience is deprived of a final, traditional revelation.

In our world today of CCTV everywhere and everyone is watched and but then again no one is watching, we, the people, tend to act if we are always being tracked, a Panopticon of society has become a philosophy of our surveyed society.

We are left with the controversial debate over who is responsible for the sending of the tapes and further doubt is cast with a surprise scene shown during the credits at the end that you have to be careful not to miss.


                                                        Film Review ...by Timo Francis ...May 2011