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Written by Robert Edgecomb Sunday, 29 January 2006 16:55

Whereas Lynch’s film takes a surreal leap, Haneke stays in the metaphysical and wants us to always be wary of the images we see, never sure if it is reality or videotape.

In one of Michael Haneke’s earlier films, Funny Games, an innocent bourgeois family is terrorized and tortured by two bored young men. They feel no guilt about their actions, and actually seem to quite enjoy all of the suffering they are creating. At one point in the film, though, after the family seems to get the upper hand, Haneke allows for one of the villains to take a remote control and rewind the scene back so he can rectify the situation.

Caché, Haneke’s newest work of sadistic beauty, starts out with a long, actionless take of a street. After a few minutes, we hear some dialogue between individuals and then the image that we once thought real starts to rewind. Michael Haneke’s work—which also includes Time of the Wolf, The Piano Teacher, and Code Unknown—has always had an underlying notion of deceit, asking us to remember that what we are watching is a movie and not reality.

In Caché, a married couple, Georges and Anne (Daniel Auteuil and Juliette Binoche), and their 12-year-old son Pierrot (Lester Makedonsky), start to receive videotapes from an unknown source starting with the scene above. The videos seem hostile in nature, depicting their house and actions (think David Lynch’s Lost Highway.) Whereas Lynch’s film takes a surreal leap, Haneke stays in the metaphysical and wants us to always be wary of the images we see, never sure if it is reality or videotape.

After many tapes, including a depiction of Georges’ childhood home and a talk he had with his mother, Georges starts to be haunted by images of a bloody Arab boy, who is made manifest when Georges follows a lead to an apartment on the other side of Paris.

About then Caché takes a jump from being a thriller—discovering who’s behind the videos—to becoming about Georges and his bottled-up guilt and regret. When he finds the intended lead, a middle-aged Algerian man, more questions are opened up, especially when a tape emerges of their entire conversation, raising issues of how first-world countries treat third-world countries and their immigrants. Their relationship becomes a parallel of how France treated Algeria, or even how America treats Africa or Latin America.

Never a director to ease up on his audience, Haneke expects complete attention to his films; the payback is well worth the leap of faith. It isn’t until the final shot of the film (over the ending credits) that all is explained by a subtle and uniquely frightening action.

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