Caché - Palm Beach Post movie review

'Caché': A warning to the watched

By HAP ERSTEIN
Palm Beach Post

There is a theory in physics that states that the mere observation of an event inherently changes the event. So it is in Michael Haneke's subtle, but unnerving film Caché (Hidden), about a Parisian couple whose lives are shattered by the knowledge that someone is silently, unobtrusively watching them and recording their comings and goings on videotape.

Sony Pictures Classics

'Caché'

The verdict: Surveillance and those surveilled upon are the subject of this subtle, psychological thriller.

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.
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Caché begins by playing with the viewer's senses of perception and perspective. We watch an extended long shot of a residential street in Paris, then learn that it is a videotape, being watched by Georges (Daniel Auteuil) and Anne (Juliette Binoche) Laurent, of their home. Tapes keep mysteriously arriving on their doorstep, and soon so do some disturbing drawings of implied violence.

The Laurents try to carry on their lives — he is a talk-show host, she is in publishing — but their existence unravels as they feel a tacit threat.

When yet another tape arrives with scenes of a farmhouse, it triggers long-forgotten childhood memories of Georges' and motivates him to track down an Algerian man from his past.

Through oblique suggestion, director-writer Haneke widens his finger-pointing to issues of national responsibility, ultimately implicating the viewer as well.

Auteuil and Binoche are two of France's best screen actors, but there is little room in Haneke's construct for them to give much evidence of their skills here.