Cache (Hidden)
Cache, the best new fiction feature I saw last year, opens with what seems like a standard establishing shot: a stationary view of the front of an upscale home. It lasts for three minutes, with very little movement in the frame–but then the footage is abruptly rewound and replayed. A cutaway reveals a nervous middle-class couple watching this scene on video. It’s their house on the screen–the tape was left anonymously on their doorstep and it’s impossible to regard it as anything other than threatening. The tapes keep coming, documenting the family’s daily life, and the rest of the film chronicles the desperate search for the originator. But as this high-concept drama progresses it involves viewers in a more critical conflict, confronting and challenging not only our relationship to the characters’ reality, but the reality of our own lives.
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The mysterious tapes threaten the security of Georges (Daniel Auteuil), the host of a literary talk show; his wife, Anne (Juliette Binoche), a literary editor; and their 12-year-old son, Pierrot (Lester Makedonsky). But as Georges investigates the source of the tapes he expends as much effort hiding his own dark history from his family–namely his childhood manipulation and abuse of Majid (Maurice Benichou), an Algerian orphan taken in by his parents. Georges suspects that the grown-up Majid is somehow involved, but the more he confronts and threatens the man the more his inner turmoil over past crimes surfaces, gradually undermining his mission, his ability to function as a husband and father, and the audience’s sympathy for him.
But demanding a straight answer is as reductive as ascribing the film’s purpose to any single notion when it has so much more to offer. Auteuil and Binoche convey an unstable emotional core of quiet middle-class security that threatens to crack at any moment. The film’s meticulous set design manages to be both banal and expressive: a wall of neatly arranged books and videos in Georges’ home illustrates his possessive bourgeois relationship to knowledge. His son’s room, featuring vibrant posters of Eminem and soccer players and a video-game steering wheel attached to his computer, suggests a portal into a wholly different personal reality, a world to which his parents seem largely oblivious. These interiors are shown in wide shots that flatten the images–everything is seen at once, yet what is actually being shown is left for the audience to discern. Haneke is also capable of breathtakingly stylized shots, such as one with Georges standing in a crowded elevator with Majid’s son–Georges avoids the son’s gaze, but their reflections in the mirrored walls create remarkable visual tension, fragments of space where individuals stand in defensive isolation.
