(2005)
Though I've never had Michael Haneke bury his fingers in my throat for two hours, I think I can approximate what that sensation must feel like after viewing Caché. Few films have exercised such sadistic control over an audience's emotions. Haneke's grasp waxes and wanes, draws blood, and even gets a little boring. The German director equips cinema's cruel devices (extreme long takes, bursts of violence, Kubrick-like coldness) to punish his characters and — to an even greater degree — his viewers.
Caché, like many of my favorite French-language thrillers, transcends its genre to explore the abstract notion of "bourgeois complacency." You can read Caché as a tight suspense film, a political allegory, both, or neither. At its core, the movie shows a man who refuses to believe that the wrongs of his past have any relevance to the horrors of his present. This disbelief, the film argues, stems from the systematic way upper-middle-class families become hermetic, depoliticized enclaves from the outside world. Caché's protagonist feels no guilt for wronging an Algerian child in his past, just as French citizens feel no guilt for the Algerian War, or Americans remain detached from the foreign policy decisions that preceded 9/11. When you've spent your life repressing past mistakes, locked safe in a comfortable suburban setting, you tend to greet the social ills of the 21st century (namely, racism and terrorism) with utter bafflement. Why is this black man so angry? Why do the terrorists hate us?
Or so Haneke's argument goes. It's a conversation-starter, to say the least. What impresses me is how he imbues such academic material into a riveting, plot-driven film. In this way, Haneke is heir to the past masters of the French-language thriller: Henri-Georges Clouzot and Claude Chabrol. Just as Clouzot subverted the genre with 1943's Le Corbeau and Chabrol with 1995’s La Cérémonie, Haneke uses thrillers to reveal the ugliness humans are capable of given their political environment. Unlike those directors, though, Haneke antagonizes his viewers, prodding them to draw connections between themselves and his protagonist on screen. Caché draws us in with its premise, only to lead us to the very places we go to the movies to ignore.
(p.s. I hope you'll forgive the slight font change. Blogger and accent marks really don't get along, from my experiences).
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