Off last night to see Caché at the
Silk Screen cinema. Not a comfortable watch and probably a puzzling one - you are recommended to stay to the end of the credits!. It tells of a presenter of a TV book show Georges (played by Daniel Auteuil) and his wife Anne (Juliette Binoche) working for a publisher and the discovery of dark secrets. The way lighting was used was fascinating - but it starts with a long held shot until you wonder whether anything is going to happen. I was involved in setting up and thought we'd not got things correct!
It deals with guilt for colonial past and personal pasts - appropriate that I saw it just a few weeks after Maurice Papon's
death who was Paris police chief at the time of the death of hundreds of Algerians by drowning in Paris. Georges and Anne start receiving videos of themselves and the house together with disturbing childlike pictures. Guilt, paranoia and non-communication take their tool.
from
Reeling Reviews:
[Georges]finally admits to Anne that he thinks he may know who is sending the tapes, but he refuses to tell her who and his excuses for not doing so are weak. Anne goes into a tailspin and cries onto Pierre's [a male colleague] shoulder about the shaky ground her marriage is on. The tapes keep coming, the subject matter turning darker, and Georges, refusing to accept responsibility for prior actions, repeats the behavior that started the cycle, adding insult upon injury. The final results are shattering and Haneke makes the impact on the audience as shocking as it is upon Georges.
and from
ae.twincities.comwhat I would like to tell you is that Haneke is such a crafty guy that, by the time we're pondering that tricky final shot, he has maneuvered us into exactly the same spot Auteuil and Binoche are in. They are so focused on who is sending the tapes that they never do deal with their own lack of generosity and compassion, which is the reason they're in the spot they're in.
In that final shot, we are like them, so obsessed with finding the answer to the who-did-it question that we miss the more important issues. Unlike them, though, we have the ability to distance ourselves from the movie and think about what it's saying, and that's when "Caché" really takes hold. It has the power to keep you up at night not because it's so scary, but because it's so provocative. "Caché" is a movie that could give you thoughtmares.
The
Guardian gets to the nub of the disturbance
It is a casual critical truism when talking about voyeurism in the movies - discussing, say, Michael Powell's Peeping Tom - to say that it implicates the viewer. Until now, I have always felt like replying: speak for yourself, mate. Yet this really does implicate you. You feel like you too are participating in this terrible, remorseless destruction.
Caché is Michael Haneke's masterpiece: a compelling politico-psychological essay about the denial and guilt mixed into the foundations of western prosperity, composed and filmed with remarkable technique. It is one of the great films of this decade.
In the introduction last night the reviewer said the conclusion was inevitable as a Greek tragedy.
Here's a long discussion on a blog.
I'd watch it again - though sometimes hiding behind the sofa!
[I've edited some of the quotes to get the names consistent between French and English]
