Caché (2005)

In Caché, Michael Haneke, never an easy filmmaker to get on with, delivers one of his best films, though the hook (if not the development) is bizarrely lifted from another movie, Lost Highway. Did Haneke coincidentally come up with this without having seen David Lynch's film, and is so intimidating no one pointed this out to him while he was pitching? Or was he inspired by Lost Highway - fascinated by a plot direction Lynch didn't take and compelled to spin his own story from the same starting point? Either way, it's not a ripoff and the two movies might make a provocative double-bill.

Georges Laurent (Daniel Auteuil), a literary pundit who hosts a bookish intellectual chat show (has Haneke got something against Mark Lawson?), is happily married to publisher Anne (Juliette Binoche) and has a normal son Pierrot (Lester Makedonsky), who's on the school swimming team. Behind several subtle layers of security grille, door and bush, the Laurents' Paris apartment is perhaps oppressively full of books and videotapes (and it takes a lot to get me to say that - though there's a chilly touch in that the shelves are dominated by blank-labelled manuscripts and tapes rather than anything with a spine or a sleeve. Videotapes are left on the Laurent doorstep, sometimes wrapped in bloody child's drawings, which at first just show two hours of a fixed shot on the exterior of the building, with all the comings and goings. Later tapes make odder links, to the farm estate in the country where Georges grew up and a less salubrious apartment in another part of town. There, Georges finds Majid (Maurice Bénichou), an Algerian who Georges's parents briefly considered adopting after his own parents (who worked for them) were killed by police during a (historically authentic) demonstration in 1961. The primal scene is that six-year-old Georges (Hugo Flamigni) managed to get young Majid (Malik Nait Djoudi) expelled from this Edenic state by telling a nasty lie about a beheaded chicken which, after much back-and-forth trouble, Georges is finally forced to explain to the bewildered Anne.

Like Funny Games, Caché pretends to be a suspense thriller even as footnotes point other ways: there's a panic when the son disappears and Georges accuses Majid (and his grown-up son) of kidnapping, which the police (who haven't changed that much since 1961) are only too eager to believe until Pierrot shows up after having spent the night unannounced with a friend. Two instances of appalling onscreen violence (one genuine, perpetrated on the chicken, and Majid's shocking, out-of-left-field cutthroat suicide) remind us how far Haneke is willing to go to get effects, even as most of the movie consists of flat medium shots either from the POV of a hidden camera or are designed to seem that way. Auteuil takes the role of victim-cum-villain in a haunted manner, projecting the smooth smugness of his class and media position perfectly, but credibly haggard when things start to fall apart - showing different sides of his personality in a shouting match with a careless (and black) cyclist and as prone to do the wrong thing as a considered grown-up (flinging accusations all over the place, withholding information from his wife) as he was as a selfish little boy.

Like Lost Highway, this doesn't wind up with a tidy explanation - neither Majid nor his son (Walid Afkir) seem to have made and delivered the tapes, and indeed this 'persecution' brings tragedy back into their lives long after they've got over it. The last act is concerned with revealing the deeply-buried truth about Georges and Majid's childhood encounter, and refuses to explain who has been making and delivering the tapes. To my reading, the most likely explanation is a spin on the Who Is Harry Kellerman premise, with Georges not knowing that another part of his personality, manifested in his flashback dreams, is responsible for the harassment, and is wrecking his life (tapes are sent to his TV station too) because he has buried his conscience so deep it has to manifest in extreme ways. There are clues: we see Georges working on the editing of his show and realise he has the technical skill to make the tapes, the dreams and the childish pictures connect to the same incident (the enemy who knows your unspoken dreams must be on to something, as in Blade Runner) and Georges makes guesses about the import of the tapes before he really could. But, if this is the case, there's a supernatural element: on a first viewing, it's impossible to tell whether Georges could get a hidden camera into Majid's flat to tape a crucial confrontation (the video continues after Georges has left, showing Majid in tears) or set up several of the other scams. But a doorbell does ring to announce a delivery while Georges is at the table with his guests and any rational explanation would involve the sort of Keyser Soze what-really-happened flashback Haneke was never going to comfort us with.

A hard-to-notice enigma in the long-held last shot implies a hook-up between Georges' son and Majid's, but they aren't quite set up as suspects: Haneke presumably isn't aware that Agatha Christie habitually cheats on mysteries by having two apparently unrelated characters turn out to be acting together in order to frame a puzzling crime, but that's what this slant on the plot would require us to swallow. Here, the actors make the story feel specific rather than, as in Time of the Wolf, a howl of hectoring misanthropy.

Haneke gets the best out of Auteuil and his supporting cast in polite, enigmatic, tense conversations: with Georges' bedridden mother (Annie Girardot), who would prefer not to remember Majid (did she always know little Georges' lied but nevertheless feel she had to get rid of the orphan if he could never get on with her natural son?); with the middle-aged Majid and his polite but hate-filled son, in their own drabber surroundings; and with Pierrot, who becomes alienated and withdrawn in a sulky pubertal way which might be exacerbated by the tensions within the home or a clue to his greater complicity.

Though he always seems to make films which have apparently tight plot mechanics and never wastes a scene or a frame, there's a sense Haneke resents cinema's power to distract and beguile. Very like Georges, he wants to undermine his own skilful façade to confront us with guilts we are all - as bourgeois Euro arthouse cinemagoers - supposed to share.
KIM NEWMAN

First published in this form here.

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