Hidden Caché
Dir: Michael Haneke France / Austria / Germany / Italy 2004 118 minutes 16
Starring: Daniel Auteuil, Juliette Binoche, Maurice Bénichou, Annie Girardot, Bernard Le Coq, Lester Makedonsky
The films of
Michael Haneke have consistently left festival audiences transfixed by their
formal audacity and their ability to evoke the menacing feeling of a society on
the edge of an abyss. He is a keen student of violence: its causes, its effects
and its implications. True to form, the feeling of suspense and impending doom
that permeates Caché is often overwhelming.
In typical Haneke style, the film begins with the comfortable but complacent
life of a bourgeois European family. However, someone has been videotaping their
home from the street outside. The unknown voyeur mails the tapes - accompanied
by strange, violent drawings - to George (Daniel Auteuil), Anne (Juliette
Binoche) and their son Pierrot (Lester Makedonsky). As the "gifts" become more
personal and begin to appear the work of someone who knows him, Georges begins
to fear that he is being punished for wronging an Algerian boy, Majid (Maurice
Bénichou), at the height of France's colonial occupation of that North African
nation. Wracked with paranoia and rage, George suspects his former friend is
taking revenge, but when he tracks him down we soon begin to question who is
victimising whom.
Auteuil is brilliant in a difficult role: an average man whose capacity for
hostility is revealed under duress. Reuniting with Haneke after her star turn in
his sublime Code inconnu, Binoche is luminous as Anne, who, while more
detached from the crisis than Georges, is nonetheless at risk of being pulled to
the brink along with him. Both actors perfectly capture their characters' slow
drift from tranquil certainty into panic and chaos.
Haneke is a master of exposing the way political conflicts and prejudices
irreparably damage the psyche and the potential for human intimacy and
communication, and Caché deftly incorporates questions of personal
responsibility, justice and the racism of France's past into an incredibly
gripping and tightly-wound psychological thriller. - Dimitri Eipides © Toronto
International Film Festival
Michael Haneke was born
in Munich and grew up in Austria. He studied philosophy, psychology and drama in
Vienna and began writing for theatre and television in the late sixties. He made
his first film, The Seventh Continent, in 1989. Since then, he has continued to
write and direct films, while also directing for the stage in Vienna and in
cities around Germany. His other films include Benny's Video (92), 71 Fragments
of a Chronology of Chance (94), Funny Games (97), Code inconnu (00), La Pianiste
(01), Le Temps du loup (03).