ACTORS AND AMBIGUITY AFTER BEING “AT HOME” WITH BBC AMERICA

CACHÉ
Directed and written by Michael Haneke; cinematography by Christian Berger; edited by Michael Hudecek and Nadine Muse; production design by Emmanual de Chauvigny and Christoph Kanter; costume design by Lisy Christl
With: Daniel Auteuil, Juliette Binoche, Maurice Bénichou, Annie Girardot, Bernard Le Coq, Walid Afkir, Lester Makedonsky, Daniel Duval, Nathalie Richard, Denis Podalydès, and Aïssa Maïga. Rated R for brief strong violence. Running time: 117 minutes

Reviewed by Joel Johnson



As some of you may already know, about the end of January I broke my ankle (“a nasty break,” is how my orthopedic surgeon described it). Caché was my first film review since my life changed with my unexpected fall. Instead of watching all the Oscar-hyped films in the homestretch to Oscar night, I have spent several weeks mostly on a couch in my home with books, magazines, and television for amusement. Prior to my injury, my wife upgraded our cable package with many more channels and a digital video recorder (DVR). The major plus as far as added channels is that we now get BBC America. By happenchance, I stumbled onto a BBC America program called At Home with the Braithwaites. This is a very guilty pleasure about a dysfunctional middle-class English family dealing with secrets, betrayals, trust issues, class issues, personal insecurities, and the problem of being watched.

These are the very same issues that concern writer/director Michael Haneke’s new film, Caché, with the obvious exceptions that the family is French, and the tone is absolutely somber. The film features two of the best contemporary French actors in top form: Daniel Auteuil and Juliette Binoche. They play husband and wife Georges and Anne Laurent. We first meet them at the conclusion of the film’s opening credit sequence. We have been watching a static view down a street looking at the front of a townhouse. Glimpses of pedestrians and vehicles as well as street noise give a hint of life to the scene. Suddenly, the scene rewinds. Georges and Anne discuss the faintly sinister oddity of receiving a videotape that records the coming and goings of their own front door. Who sent this? And why?

These are the questions that will dog the audience as well as Georges and Anne. Soon, other tapes will appear. There’ll be a tape of Georges’s childhood home. There’ll also be crude childish drawings that appear to show spewing blood. Georges grasps that these refer to events from his past. The tapes keep coming, and others start getting the same tapes as the Laurents.

The Laurents are a picture perfect upper-middle-class family with Georges, Anne, and their cusp-of-adolescence son Pierrot. Pierrot is a handsome, moody lad with a moppet of curls, and his spare time is filled training with a swim team. A power couple, Anne works for a publishing house, and Georges is the television host for a literary discussion program. The program’s set features a background of faux bookshelves that also are featured in Georges’s home. Like the faux bookshelves, the veneer of bourgeois success, happiness, and civility begins to peel off the Laurents. The tapes that show that their lives are being observed become increasingly distressing. When Pierrot fails to tell them about an overnight with a friend, their paranoia becomes overwhelming. The couple deals with the stress differently. Anne shares her concerns, while Georges conceals his. As Georges wrestles with nightmarish memories from decades past and verbally lashes out at any handy target, Anne and the audience become increasingly aware that Georges is not telling all he knows. This comes to a head when he tells Anne he thinks he knows who is behind the tapes but won’t share this with her until he is sure. Charges and countercharges are fired back and forth about who should be trusted.

A conventional film would have the victimized couple eventually turning the tables on their tormentors. Haneke’s film is not at all conventional. The Hitchcockian setup is not supported by a powerfully evocative score à la Bernard Hermann. Haneke’s film has no musical accompaniment. There’s only one violent act—all the more shocking for its matter-of-factness. There is no easy villain. In fact, it is almost convincing that there is no villain at all. Georges’s childhood nemesis truly appears to be totally oblivious to the tapes. The tapes themselves seem too ubiquitous. The film is labyrinthine with lots of twists, turns, and dead ends. All the labyrinth lacks is a path to the answers the Laurents and the audience seek. The film layers ambiguity on ambiguity and successfully captures the fear and desperation of being constantly watched and yet not having any idea why. In our post-9/11 times of an ongoing terrorist threat, the idea of being watched by ubiquitous observers and facing amorphous threats certainly may resonate for many filmgoers. There are also other reverberations of today’s war on terror. Georges’s childhood nemesis was a young Algerian orphan whose parents were killed during the bloody war for Algerian independence 1954–1962 (The film October 17, 1961 by Alain Tasma, featured in the Film Society of Lincoln Center’s New Directors/New Films 2006 Film Series, dramatizes this pivotal off-screen historical event in Caché). News reports of the violence from this war spilling back into France constituted my childhood introduction to terrorism. This film highlights the collective—specifically French—guilt for the colonial exploitation of Algeria and for the current perceived mistreatment of Islamic, largely Algerian, immigrants that led to widespread rioting in France last fall. Of course, this could very easily be lost on non-French audiences or audiences unfamiliar with these events for whom the personal story of Georges’s childhood wrongdoing, the mystery of whoever is using the tapes to hold him accountable, and the intimate domestic drama of how the Laurents cope with this vague threat would be much easier to focus on. Though the film is intriguing and keeps the audience’s interest, it is frustrating for audiences expecting answers. The audience with whom I saw the film let out several audible sighs of exasperation. Low tolerance for ambiguity would be a contraindication for seeing this film.

This, of course, brings me back to At Home with the Braithwaites. Certainly, the story lines of this program and Caché are markedly different even if the underlying themes are similar, right down to the power that a child can wield. The tone of Caché is that of deadpan reality (even if it seems as though reality is ultimately betrayed), while the Braithwaites is a high-spirited, no-holds-barred hybrid of soap opera, comedy, and fantasy. As good as the actors are and as compelling and layered a story as Haneke has created, I’d rather watch the Braithwaites dealing with secrets, betrayals, trust issues, class issues, personal insecurities, and the problem of being watched. Watching Caché made me feel like I had spent 117 minutes chasing my own tail.  

 

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