SINS OF THE FATHER
A man is haunted by his past in 'Caché'
By Andy Klein
The opening credits of Caché (a.k.a. Hidden) run over a single static shot (with one brief cutaway) of an apartment building in an upscale Parisian neighborhood. Our vantage point is far enough down an alleyway across the street that we can barely make out the faces of the occasional pedestrians and bike riders who pass by; and the credits form a solid block of letters almost too small to be read. Halfway through the five-minute shot, the credits disappear; we hear voices on the soundtrack, discussing the image; and we realize that what we are seeing is not the narrative's "present," but a videotape we have been viewing, along with our main characters, Georges (Daniel Auteuil) and Anne (Juliette Binoche).
An hour and 50 minutes later, the closing credits scroll over another distant static shot, this time of students getting out of school. It is again almost impossible to make out details, despite the fact that, at the start of the shot, before the credit crawl begins, one corner of the screen contains some inconspicuous action, which may or may not provide the key to understanding what has transpired during the intervening body of the film. These two long single takes bookend the movie with perfect symmetry.
Or is it perfect? Are we watching another videotape at the end, together with Georges or Anne or someone else? Or are we ourselves again, spectators in a theater, watching part of the film's "reality"?
It's part of the fascination of Austrian director Michael Haneke's latest that we don't know, and that there is at least one other possible reading of the last scene (which we will get to below).
In the initial voiceover and the ensuing scenes, we learn that Anne has found the tape on their doorstep; it is, essentially, a surveillance tape of their own building; and neither he nor Anne has any clue as to who shot it or, more to the point, why. They are understandably creeped out and grow increasingly so, as tapes of other meaningful locales arrive. Georges has suspicions about what's going on; and his obvious reluctance to share them with Anne begins to damage their relationship.
David Lynch fans will immediately recognize this plot hook as being identical to that of his 1997 Lost Highway, in which a jazz musician (Bill Pullman) and his wife (Patricia Arquette) find tapes of their private lives on their doorstep - first their house's exterior, then its interior, and finally even their bedroom. To say the experience destroys their marriage would be an understatement. (Amazingly, almost no reviews have mentioned this connection.)
While the similarity is conceivably coincidental, Haneke has inserted a hint that it's not. The first line in Lost Highway is "Dick Laurent is dead" - referring to a character who becomes important in the second half of the movie. Haneke has given Georges and Anne the last name "Laurent": that, together with the plot, strikes me as not conceivably coincidental.
This is not to suggest that Haneke has ripped off or unofficially remade Lost Highway. He and Lynch couldn't be further apart in terms of style or sensibility. (There is only one image in Caché that has even a whiff of Lynch about it - a tracking shot down a hotel corridor.) Where Lynch spills his subconscious out on the screen and takes us to weird places that aren't part of the everyday world, yet somehow coexist with it, Haneke's movies are closer to mundane reality. He is centrally concerned with politics and history, areas that Lynch seems blithely uninterested in. Music is crucial in Lynch's films; Caché is one of a number of Haneke works with no soundtrack music at all. Perhaps the biggest difference is that Lynch, even at his spookiest, is wonderfully comic, whereas the dour Haneke has nary a funny bone in his body. (Of course, it's probably been decades since the phrase "happy Haneke" has been heard in Austria.)
Haneke has other fish to fry, and most of these fish are self-satisfied liberal intellectuals and other bourgeois types, whom he guts, fillets, and cooks to a crisp. Georges Laurent is the host of an erudite TV talk show; he clearly sees himself as a "good" man. But the tapes begin to stir memories of a petty deceit from his childhood that may have had a profoundly negative effect on the life of a young Algerian boy; he becomes convinced that the current harassment is the Algerian's revenge, 40 years after the fact.
As Georges grows increasingly anxious, it's not certain what is agitating him more - fear or guilt. He insists he doesn't feel guilty about what he did; his very insistence is only one of the signs that he is virtually haunted by guilt. There are also his nightmares and the extent to which he endangers his marriage by repeatedly lying to his wife, so as not to admit to his youthful deed. (Auteuil is extraordinary throughout, but never more than in the scene of his partial confession to Anne - a confession in which bits of truth drown in a sea of omissions and new lies.)
Among its possible readings, Caché is clearly a political metaphor. His betrayal of the boy comes in the aftermath of France's 1961 slaughter of Algerian protesters. And Georges, like his generally liberal country as a whole, has papered over an injustice, wiped it from his mind, only to find it bubbling up a generation later.
Caché has won numerous awards, including Best Foreign Language Film from the Los Angeles Film Critics Association. While I can't make a strong argument against this selection, my preference would have been Oldboy, which deals with similar issues in a completely different manner. Park Chan-wook's thriller is also about a man being persecuted for a childhood indiscretion, an act that, like Georges's, may have been wrong in a fairly minor way, but had unpredictably catastrophic results.
Oldboy is also a political allegory about South Korea not coming to grips with its past. But, where Haneke's style is spare and crisp, Park's film is nonstop delirium, several continents away from Haneke's rigorous realism.
Or am I overstating the realism of Caché? I mentioned at the start that the final shot contains a detail that most viewers, if they spot it at all, regard as a hint to the otherwise unsettled question around which the plot revolves - who made the tapes, and why. It probably is such a hint, though, even with it, the solution still doesn't entirely make sense or is, at best, ambiguous.
But there is another way to read it (Andy suggests, while dragging out his favorite hobbyhorse). The film's last three scenes show an exhausted Georges taking a couple of sleeping pills, drawing the shades tight, and climbing into bed for some long overdue rest; then a flashback of the climactic moment of his childhood sin; then the four-minute static shot that contains the "hidden" clue. The few other flashbacks throughout the film have all been Georges's memories or dreams; there is no reason to imagine this one is any different. The solution that the last shot suggests may not make sense, but it constitutes Georges's worst nightmare. And, given the two previous scenes, maybe that's exactly what it is.
Published: 12/22/2005
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