But we can count on Foucault's surveillance society to expose them all again.
You may not notice, while watching Caché, that it's nearly completely silent; with the exception of dialogue and ambient noise, the film has no soundtrack, which is so rare in our era of Dolby Digital and screaming tie-in CD sales that it's almost an aural assault in its own right. At the very least, it's unsettling; and unsettled is exactly what director Michael Haneke wants us to be, from start to finish. Discomfitingly, he succeeds.
At first, during what seem like endless establishing shots of nothing, the viewer's exposed repeatedly to a single point of view: we're positioned on one side of the street in a seemingly quiet Paris suburb, looking across to the other side, and for long stretches we see very little we'd deem important by cinematic conventions. We realize we're looking at a ***image1***particular house-the home of Georges (Daniel Auteuil) and Anne (Juliette Binoche), an upscale couple who live there with their teenaged son Pierrot (Lester Makedonsky). Georges hosts a public television cultural review program and Anne works in publishing. The couple seem comfortably numb in their well-heeled bourgeoise existence, until grocery bags containing odd videotapes begin to show up on their doorstep; the tapes show the same apparently pointless surveillance of their home we've been seeing, and then of other streets as well. When the mystery videographer branches out into disturbing childish postcards decorated with crayon-red blood, and the French police seem ill-inclined to investigate, Georges takes matters into his own hands.
Without telling Anne, he pays a visit to one of the locations shown on tape and doesn't seem at all surprised to meet an old family friend there: Majid (Maurice Bénichou). Georges and Majid exchange terse words with a lot of voltage behind them; eventually we learn that Georges' parents were to have adopted Majid when the two men were children, Majid's parents (and the family servants) having been killed in the massacre of October 1961.
Never heard of the October 1961 police massacre? No accident, that; it's one of those sordid little pieces of history about which France wishes everyone would forget, like the Deportation, Vichy, Dreyfus. Somewhere between 35 and 200 Algerians were killed by Paris police during a demonstration, beaten and drowned in the Seine. France's bad conscience is paralleled by that of Georges' ***image4***parents (including that of his elderly mother, played with consummate artistry by Annie Girardot)-but their son, awash in infant jealousy, did something to prevent the adoption from taking place. We don't know what, any more than we know who's sending the tapes-though Georges is convinced it's Majid. The answers come teasingly, and only if we study the visual evidence of the film as if our lives depended on deciphering it.
Caché
, it feels unnecessary to say, is insidious genius (especially when compared with the banal idiocy of this year's Oscar upset,
Crash
-or France's self-congratulatory entrant,
Joyeux Noël
). Auteuil and Binoche are ruthless, at the top of their games, and Bénichou's gentleness belies an inevitable abrupt violence (one of the most shocking acts I've ever seen onscreen). If we in the default position insist on only watching challenging films as long as they're made by white people, we could do worse than
Caché
, which joins Matthieu Kassovitz's
La Haine
as an unflinching and incredibly subtle exploration of guilt and racism in France-and her colonies.
