Caché (2006)

Director: Michael Haneke
Writer: Michael Haneke

Strange surveillance-type videos and post cards begin showing up at the home of a talk-show host and his wife. While trying to uncover who is sending the disturbing materials, the already strained relationship between husband and wife is punt under even more pressure.

Haneke has quickly become one of my new favorite filmmakers. My first brush with his work was when a close friend of mine told me I had to see this messed up movie called The Piano Teacher (2001). It was a truly upsetting film. My next experience with Haneke was Funny Games (1997), which is, hands down, one of the most emotionally brutal films I've ever seen. Caché is no exception. Haneke implements his long take style quite effectively in this film. The opening static shot, running a solid three minutes, in a way prepares the viewer for the rest of the film. The scene is an exterior shot of an upscale town home-like façade. Cars, pedestrians, and cyclists pass with synchronous audio. Then come the nonsynchronous voices of the married couple, Georges and Anne Laurent (Daniel Auteuil and Juliette Binoche), but at first we have no context for these voices. Haneke cuts to a different angle of the street as Georges walks out with Anne to inspect an alley and then back to the original static shot as the couples' voices reverberate in what sounds like an open room. Just then, the screen freezes and fast-forwards, a throw back to a pivotal moment in Funny Games. The spectator has just been duped by this technique, which Haneke will reuse throughout the film.

A regular obsession of Haneke's is central to the narrative of this film: the effect of new media, especially video, on reality. This is a topic Haneke has tackled before, most notably in Benny's Video (1992). But what does all that have to do with the opening shot? Like much of his work, Caché is a highly reflexive film. With that first sequence, Haneke is making his audience aware of not just their position as spectator but also the film's position as a piece of art. Because of our past consumption of films and engrained understanding of standardized visual and aural codes, we automatically assume that the exterior establishing shot is just that: an establishing shot. We take for granted that the filmmaker could be lying to us, manipulating our trust, and using our preconceptions against us. While film is not exactly a new medium (with over a century of practice under its belt), artists like Haneke find new ways to use and interpret the filmic image. In this case, working out how video can be use antagonistically.

As the story unfolds, we find out that what we saw on screen is a tape that mysteriously appeared on the Laurents' doorstep. As the film progresses, more tapes appear along with post cards and papers with the same crude drawing of a person bleeding from the mouth. The already strained relationship between Georges and Anne slowly fractures as they try to figure out who is stalking them. Using the images on the tapes as clues, Georges confronts a man from his past, which leads to tragedy. Haneke repeatedly emphasizes and reminds the audience of the voyeuristic nature of watching a film. The spectator identifies with the couple - Georges and Anne are also manipulated by the images on the screen - but is also implicated with the stalker by watching the couple's relationship crumble. Once the film ends, the spectator is forced to deal with Haneke's manipulations.

As impressive as Caché is, I do have one gripe. With the introduction of the drawings, there seems to be a subplot, made of visual clues, that pops up briefly. These clips are living versions of the stalker's drawings. As Georges explains an event from his childhood involving another boy (who he later confronts as an adult), we are led to believe these brief clues are Georges' memories. If so, then it seems like an unnecessary bout of subjectivity in the middle of an exercise in objectivity. Perhaps Haneke wants to interrupt our innate desire to identify with the story in some way by inserting this contradictory subplot. A few more viewings may bear out the rationale but for now, this seems like a superfluous narrative tangent. The only thing I can think of is that it may be acting as a parallel to the later confrontation, a mental association Georges makes, but again, the sudden introduction into Georges' mind is troubling from a narrative standpoint. Then again, what about Haneke's work isn't troubling on one level or another?