Caché - The Atlanta Journal-Constitution movie review

'Caché': Terror grows when someone's watching

By ELEANOR RINGEL GILLESPIE
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

From the very first shot — a view of an apartment on a quiet Paris street that's held for several minutes as cars pass and people stroll by — director Michael Haneke puts us on notice. Things are rarely as they seem in "Caché," his coolly elegant French mystery-thriller about an upper-middle-class couple whose seemingly perfect lives unravel when they are sent a series of disturbing surveillance tapes.

Sony Pictures Classics

'Caché'

B+

The verdict: A disturbing, classy mystery-thriller with an astute political subtext.

Director: Michael Haneke
Starring: Daniel Auteuil, Juliette Binoche, Maurice Bénichou, Annie Girardot, Lester Makedonsky
Run time: 118 minutes
Release date: Dec. 23, 2005
Rating: R for brief strong violence.
Language: In French with subtitles.
See showtimes

On the web
Official movie site
View the trailer
Trailers require Quicktime

As it turns out, that opening scene is actually one of the tapes — not the movie proper, so to speak. The camera pans over to show us Georges and Anne Laurent (Daniel Auteuil and Juliette Binoche) seated on a sofa watching this inexplicable intrusion into their personal lives that has arrived, unbidden, on their doorstep. More tapes follow, some of them even filmed inside their home, followed by a series of childish yet threatening drawings of a figure vomiting blood.

Who is sending this stuff? And why? And how do they manage such intimate access? At the very end, who and how are revealed (you have to watch very closely). The why, however, unfolds discreetly over the course of the film as we discover that underneath the Laurents' smooth-as-glass privileged existence lurk a nasty secret or two.

As he demonstrated in the chillingly brilliant "The Piano Teacher," Haneke is a merciless director. He films what he likes and lets the audience take care of themselves. And if they can't, then going to one of his pictures probably wasn't a very good idea in the first place.

Throughout the movie, we're never quite sure whether or not we're watching another surveillance tape. Before long, we're as off-balance as Georges and Anne. And as their trust in each other erodes, so does any trust we may have had for Haneke. The result is an ever-building sense of dread.

With its theme of voyeurism, "Caché" inevitably recalls Alfred Hitchcock's "Rear Window." But Haneke has a more politicized agenda than Hitchcock ever did. He applies his rigorous intelligence and meticulous moviemaking skills to examining the tensions between well-off Parisians and the Algerian underclass. The answer to the movie's central riddle is tied up in that ugly history. The Laurents and their well-to-do friends may talk a good liberal game over cocktails, but the reality is they want nothing to do with the Third World — and they certainly don't want it to actually intrude into their lives ... as these damnable tapes have.

Politicized as it is, the movie never becomes didactic, thanks to the excellent acting and the firm, confident direction (Haneke was named best director at Cannes). "Caché" tells us the battle of Algiers isn't over. That it may never be over, as long as the gap between the haves and the have-nots remains unbridgeable. As Pogo might say, we have met the enemy. And he is us.