Caché, 2005

Cache is a film that is drenched in subtlety. Director Michael Haneke paces us through an intense mind-bender which requires us to consider the implications of every shot all the way to the very end. The film focuses on Georges, an affluent French literary critic, whose life takes a dramatic decline when he is forced to confront buried truths about his past. Someone has been videotaping him with a hidden camera and sending the tapes to his house and work place. The tapes are wrapped in white paper featuring an image drawn in a child like manner of a man with a violent splatter of blood pouring from his throat. The intensity of the film builds from Georges desire to figure out who is responsible. He finally has a "hunch" and decides to visit an apartment featured in one of the tapes, which ends up belonging to Ajid, an Algerian man with whom Georges had shared a small portion of his childhood. Ajid's character is blank and deliberately impenetrable. We do not know if he is lying or telling the truth, although Georges believes he has been sending the tapes. The viewer only knows that Georges had supposedly caused irreparable damage in Aji's life, but the details about what Georges actually did remain unclear. With the introduction of Ajid's character, Cache takes on a new complexity. The film becomes a portrait of class guilt and buried secrets. We see the parallelism between Georges' relationhip with Ajid's and the contentious relations between the white French and Maghreb people. Several scenes and dialogues throughout the film add weight to this political dimension. They suggest that there is a pervading state of paranoia amongst the wealthy in France. The Maghreb people are invading their space. The Maghreb people are threatening their lives. But, what is the real threat and who is the real victim? Ajid or Georges? Throughout the movie, a void remains where sympathy should fill. It is difficult to take sides and the viewer cannot help but remain emotionally frigid.

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I would agree with most and say the film is slow, most of which is probably useless. I didn't feel the length of the shots built any suspense or represented isolation, something which "2001" did successfully. Beyond that the story and acting were decent, nothing special, but good. Some may feel the ending leaves you hanging, but that's where your own perceptions and imagination comes in. The director actually explains in his interview why he ended the film that way, it not only is more realistic, but if he spelled everything out it would change the way you feel about Georges and thus take away from the main theme of the movie. It's much like "Broken Flowers", where it's not so much about the story, but rather about the people and the experiences that have changed them (how are they different from the beginning of the movie, and was it for the best?). I will probably always remember a particular scene from this movie, as I found it to be one of the most unexpected and shocking moments I've seen on film... other than that I'd say it's a decent movie, nothing more.

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An insightful thriller about a man who is haunted by the past, although tries his best to convince himself he's not. Wonderful depth to this intelligent film, one of the best French films of the last couple of years.

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