Michael Haneke’s Cache (Transcript) Originally broadcast January 27, 2006
Milos Stehlik
Listen to Milos Stehlik's Commentary
Michael Haneke’s film Cache has one of the best opening scenes of any film in recent memory. As we watch through the credits, Haneke pulls the rug out from under us. Suddenly, we become aware that the scene we were watching was not reality, but a surveillance videotape. In an instant, our vision is compromised and we are complicit; we are voyeurs. The scene is the first salvo in Haneke’s assault on guilt, in a film which is both strange and unsettling.
Juliette Binoche and Daniel Auteuil, in two consummate acting performances, play Anne and Georges Laurent. They are a comfortable middle-class couple leading the rewarding life of two achievers: she as a publisher, he as the host of a literary talk show on television. They have a young son. Everything is perfect—or so we assume. But as the film begins, their lives are already unraveling. They are being watched. Crude surveillance videotapes are deposited through their mailbox. Mysterious, cartoonish postcards with violent images arrive, one even delivered to the son as he sits in school.
Love, romance, relationship, emotion have little place in Cache, as in most of Haneke’s films. He is kind of a cinematic scientist, an analyst of guilt and perversion, a biologist who dissects the absences that populate his characters’ lives.
Haneke started his career in Austria and his films have always concerned the intersection of guilt and responsibility. He is not afraid to shock. His second feature, Benny's Video, begins with videotaped footage of the slaughter of a pig and plays with distorting our auditory and visual senses with video that breaks apart into snow and lines. In later films like Seventh Continent and Code Inconnu and the Cannes Festival Award-winning The Piano Teacher, which introduced Haneke to the mainstream, the films are underscored with an ever present current of violence.
In Cache (or Hidden) this violence rests in both the future and the past. The violence projected into the future are the menacing videotapes and other disorienting messages that arrive and unsettle Anne and Georges' existence. It soon becomes evident that this anxiety and fear that Haneke stirs up in his characters must come from the past. But what past? The past is memory, and memory is shrouded in guilt, which in itself is murky, unclear, unspecific—a dull pain.
The guilt Georges carries lies in the suppressed memory of his provincial childhood. Its roots are a single jealous act of a child which altered the life of another human being. It was tinted in racism. This act connects to the political events of October 17, 1961 , when more than 200 Algerian protesters were killed by the Paris police. At the time, the police were commanded by Nazi collaborator Maurice Papon.
Haneke says he wanted to make this film on guilt, “specifically about an adult who has to confront something he did as a child.” He says he found his inspiration while watching a documentary about the 1961 massacre: “I was shocked that something like that could have happened in a liberal country. And more unbelievable that France hadn’t addressed the issue for more than 40 years.”
This is heavy stuff, but it is handled by Haneke as a Hitchcockian thriller. He exhibits ease as the levels of reality are stripped off in layers. This gets repetitive at times. We get drawn into the vortex of Georges’s past through the irrationality of Georges’s present. But ultimately the emotional sway of this thriller seems to outweigh the core logic on which the film is based. The whole film leads to our discovery of the terrible deed committed by Georges in the past as a child. But by the time Haneke gets to this point we, like the characters in the film, are rattled by anxiety, fear, and the bizarre situations. In this state of anxiety, Georges’s sinful act seems far too dramatically reasoned. It is too efficient. At the end, we are not sure that anything we’ve seen in Cache really makes any sense. Yet having some sense of completion is important if the guilt Haneke wants to explore is going to stick with us.
This is amplified by the closing scene which propels the film into a powerful yet completely ambiguous ending that brings the film full-circle. Is there room for a sequel?
Still, Cache is a film that is brilliant and original. Haneke is a master analyst, and a very smart filmmaker whose intelligence shows off best when he manipulates and contrasts filmed reality with that elicited by surveillance. That subject—you are being watched but don’t know who is watching or what they really want—is a subject which today has more currency for us than ever.
This is Milos Stehlik for Chicago Public Radio’s Worldview.
Worldview film contributor Milos Stehlik is the director of Facets Multimedia.
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