Caché

In some ways, Michael Haneke is the soapboxing, socially conscious heir to Alfred Hitchcock: concerned less with psychosexual hangups than the growing impact of video and the omnipresence of modern communication on our daily lives. "A feature film is 24 lies per second," he once said (a cynical response to Jean-Luc Godard's declaration of the truth of images), and one imagines him saying it while brandishing a cane and telling neighborhood children to stay off his lawn. But there's a certain charm -- for lack of a better word -- in his irascibility, as well as his firm hand on suspense.

Indeed, no other film of the decade so completely captures Hitch's capacity for filtering pop psychology through the sieve of a thriller than his magnum opus Caché, which took Cannes by storm back in 2005. Where Hitch derived his tension through his masterful direction and pacing -- perceptive audiences will note how bad the effects were in his films, and I say "perceptive" because he was so skilled at grabbing your attention that one must break away from its current to focus on the problem -- Haneke opens Caché with a static long take. In the frame is the exterior of a house in Paris: not a modest flat, nor an opulent house. It plays in silence until two characters in a voiceover begin to speak over it. At last, lines appear in the image, and the action reverses, revealing the image to be a videotape watched by those speaking over it.

The voices belong to Georges Laurent (Daniel Auteuil) and his wife Anne (Juliette Binoche), two bourgeois French intellectuals who first regard the tape with curiosity: is it a prank? How did Georges walk in front of the camera and look in its general direction -- as evidenced by the tape -- without seeing it? When more tapes arrive, however, accompanied by crude, childlike drawings of violent acts, their curiosity morphs into fear, which in turn becomes uncontrollable paranoia. In a nod to Hitchcock, Haneke has put his hand in Rear Window and turned it inside out.

That inversion of Hitch's plot is but a small piece of Haneke's larger stance as the perfect antimatter for the master of suspense and his style: Hitch used threadbare plots and basic acting to force his audience into cheap identification before turning their world upside-down to reduce them to primal states of fear and lust. It's a barbaric method of filmmaking, but it's also often entertaining as hell and I never did leap aboard the haters' wagon. Haneke too can be cruel: his camera -- even when following the characters outside of his subtly terrifying static voyeurism -- is objective and detached, preventing even a tenuous emotional identification between the audience and characters. But that objectivity serves him just as a 3rd person perspective benefits an author, allowing him to gauge his characters and the situations around them.

His emotional distance reveals many social issues evident in the couple's relationship, such as the gender gap. Georges works on a TV show, bloviating with other critics on the merits of works of art; their program likely strikes even the French as pretentious. Anne is no less intelligent, but Haneke undercuts the idea of equality in the modern, educated couple by making Georges the bread-winner and the final word on every subject. Neither devotes much time to their son Pierrot, as Georges subtly hints that it's "woman's work" and Anne is too busy protesting the inequality in her relationship with her husband to care for the child. When she protests her husband's exclusive attempts to find their tormentor and counters his pleas for her to simply "trust" him with a plea for him to reciprocate on that trust, Georges looks at his wife as if she's gone mad. Haneke is harsh, but sympathetic to her helplessness, viewing her inability to assert herself not as a personal or biological weakness but the result of a social structure that continues to oppress women, different from past times in that it name check equality to look superior. Contrasted with Hitchcock's brand of sexism, Haneke's is an actual commentary on that sexism.

As the unseen voyeur -- it might as well be Haneke himself -- he slowly guides these decreasingly sane individuals to epiphanies; Caché is less about the hidden camera than what has been hidden in these characters to shape them into the people we see. The Laurents receive footage of areas other than their own house, leading Georges to the apartment of Majid, a man from Georges' past. Majid, an Algerian immigrant who lived with Georges and his parents until Georges told lies to have him ejected, evokes themes of racism and social status -- Majid's son later tells Georges that his father could have gotten an education had he stayed with the Laurents and not been forced into an orphanage, that he too might have enjoyed a comfortable upper-middle class life instead of dwelling in a cramped apartment into late middle age. For a deceptively simple film, Haneke manages to uncover not only the lingering ignorance even among the intellectuals but the echoes of the racist past of the country itself (Majid's story is closely tied to the Algerian War and the Paris massacre of 1961).

Georges and Majid's confrontation also permits Haneke to study our ability to convince even ourselves of our lives. Georges has put his childhood menace out of mind, but he begins to suffer nightmares of that childhood (the images in his dreams coincide with the drawings accompanying the tapes) that show how, even subconsciously, he believes the story he told his parents to remove Majid from his home. Haneke pokes holes in his own maxim by showing the truth of video, not its capacity for manipulation and deceit. Home video devices store data, or memory, to be played back for buyers -- this is more literally true of digital media like DVDs or Blu-Ray than the analog videocassettes sent to the Laurents -- and Haneke refashions them into devices to store human memory as well; after all, what is a home movie but a memory permanently enshrined in a hard copy?

Haneke's direction is never showy, but he and his editors, Michael Hudecek and Nadine Muse, have the skill of maintaining the atmosphere of a thriller even as the question of who's recording these tapes and tormenting this family fades into an exploration of those characters. The simple act of transitioning from those drab, immobile shots of building exteriors to tracking and panning shots of the characters is jolting, often leaping from the dully lit static shots to bright and colorful action, such as young Pierrot in swim meets. Some may even get hung up with the lack of action in the film, as it's so concise and well-paced that even those who admire its exploration of themes can't be faulted for constantly expecting more action than Haneke gives us.

Indeed, Haneke shows only two scenes of violence, one odd and somewhat imagined, the other a stark, horrific moment that's all too real. This last act brings a terrible finality to Majid and Georges' decades-long conflict and a sobering look at how France's post-'68 intellectual socialism still hasn't eradicated the racism and disparity between classes that drive some people to desperation (La Haine was an excellent glimpse into this social problem as well). But, for all Haneke's supposed misanthropy and cynicism -- here is a man so pissed off by the lasting relevance of his 1997 work Funny Games that he remade it shot-for-shot a decade later with English-speaking actors so he could get ignorant Americans to watch it without bitching about suffering the indignity of having to "read" a film -- he has the optimism to insert the film's epilogue, an unheard conversation between the sons of Majid and Georges. Perhaps Haneke does not allow us to hear what they have to say because it is not worth hearing, a rehash of their parents' conflict that starts the cycle anew. But maybe, just maybe, their brief meeting contains the spark of reconciliation, and the hope that, through talking out issues and understanding the problems that plagued past generations, the current youth can one day move beyond a legacy of hate and fear. Didn't know ya had it in you, you cranky Austrian bastard.