Michael Haneke's CACHE (insert your own accent over the e)

xp yes Dan.

EXTREMELY effective, for better and worse

'the piano teacher' is a wriggling mess of a film; and at times, in certain scenes, there is almost far too much going on to allow time for effective in situ analysis: the scene betw. klemmer and teacher in the toilet of the conservatoire shifts so subtly over its length the movie could sustain all its power on its weight - but of course it couldn't; it's not a case of having his cake and eat it either; he lets the rooms speak for themselves, let's them decide who gets what cake etc.

has a masterful touch with allowing people to think the proper amount of time too

perhaps a silly attitude toward TV but then he worked its halls for 11 years so understandable if not excusable

it depends on what you think this gift is being turned to i suppose

i don't really know how i feel about haneke

i thought code: unknown was really exciting

the only other leant-forward hands on my knees experience I ever had was when I managed to catch 'safe' at the cinema and I had to be prized from the screen - 'the piano teacher' left me with a fraction of that feeling tht time round (maybe synthetic, since I ws in the emotionally-charged arena of a date (not date));

anyway, given too much away again

xp weirdly i was just thinking of Greenaway w/r/t Haneke.

opinions on the final shot? is that majid's son approaching pierre at the bottom corner of the steps?

I saw this film at the London film festival and Daniel Auteil was there to answer questions after the film. He should be a stand up comic! He's really witty and funny.

The you know what scene is one of the most shocking things I've ever seen on film even though I should've predicted what would happen. The audience seemed to be just as disgusted.

"intellectual"

these seem problematic to me

even in a narrow sense: todd haynes, terrence malick, hong sang-soo...

he's austrian

x-post

some are german tho right? 'der sieben kontinent', '71 fragments...', 'the castle'

m.haneke's films are very self-consciously intellectual tho, taking on a lot of feted intellectual themes

yes, but this is true of so many!

xp

ok

i've got rhythm

i've got music

who could ask for anything more?

x-post

michael haneke: a song, a joke, a laugh, a smoke

anything like HK triads?

re: the SPOILER -- the funny thing is, a friend told me to watch the final scene closely and i still missed (partly because i wasn't sure it was the final scene so wasn't paying attention). but from online discussion i've read, yes, i guess that is there. but even knowing it, i'm not sold on its significance -- even tho you can read it a lot of different ways, none of them really make sense narratively. it seems a little cheap, almost a standard hollywood "twist."

re: the legacy of racism, etc., which is the major theme (or one of them, depending on read it -- there's also the theme of parent-child relationships). yeah, i get it. and it's not badly done. but from interviews w/him where he's all like, "the french people must confront their past," i mean, it's a little didactic. which i think his stuff tends to be.

anyway, i basically enjoyed it while i was watching. it's pretty fucking suspenseful, for one thing. but i'm not sold on him as a thinker.

also something uncomfortable about him repeating this line in the context of say cannes press conferences where the french press nods in assent

makes me wonder why his version of politicals employs so many elaborate metaphors. if he wanted french to confront their past, he could have made a film about the 1961 incident

xpost: don't worry about the spoiler -- like i said, i think it adds up to less than it wants to appear to

well i guess his next movie is gonna be a hitler youth thing so he can rub his own countrymen's nose in their shit. which i suppose they will love.

forget what i said.

yeah, that's about how i feel. binoche and auteuil are good -- he casts his movies well.

but yeah, the interview i read w/him about his nazi movie was about how he wants to confront austrians who he thinks are still in denial about their complicity.

agreed. I can't get through a Noe film but I've seen Piano Teacher and I get the same vibe of v intense & uberserious misanthropy. The latter film was still interesting to me, though maybe only because I think Isabelle Huppert is fantastic.

I appreciate Armond White. I don't know how to say it, but though I rarely/never wholeheartedly agree with him, I am often as irritated as he is at the critical stance he's incessantly complaining about. It'd be nice if he could put it out of his mind for a while and just write about the film. I have a feeling Caché is going to make me very, very angry for precisely the reasons he describes.. we'll see.

Uh...wait til you see Cache.

(I haven't seen any Noe films, so I'm not defending or refuting the comparison, but there's certainly some emptiley shcoking moves pulled in Cache)

very well put. i can't take him seriously as a REAL CRITIC, but his invective can be entertaining. he's fun to go away from for a real long while, come back briefly, and go away for another real long while.

i suppose they are both playing the same game as cutty says "holding a mirror up to the audience".

xposts

Colin, that's where Haneke IS different, i think. he's most certainly NOT getting off on the violence.

I haven't seen enough of his films to know whether or not I agree or disagree with you. What I have seen (Cache, The Piano Teacher and Funny Games doesn't convince me. (SPOILER: The throat-cutting scene in Cache is violence pornography that doesn't achieve any sort-of substantial self-reflection).

I don't have the time to write more now. But I think the value of "holding up a mirror" to the audience the way Haneke does needs to be discussed. It's always the fall-back defense for filmmakers like this (even some I love: Park, Verhoeven, Hitchcock), but I think it's really difficult to pull-off without the thoughtless audience-torture I see from Haneke.

(separate thoughts:)
"Director implicating himself" is an equally old trope, but I think Haneke's refusual to do so really limits the success of his films. All I've gotten from his films is a sense of violent aggression that really limits any value his provocations might hold.

I think very few filmmakers actually do it, but it's a line often trotted out to defend filmmakers.

this is probably a conventional view, but i appreciate the extreme reticence of say hou hsiao-hsien more than the confrontationalism of haneke. in terms of dealing with national traumas etc.

wrote in a recent post about watching Michael Haneke's "Funny Games" and how it upset my dog Edith even more than me. I turned it off (to quiet Edith) and grabbed my laptop to find what people had to say about the movie. I found a fascinating quote from Haneke in a Chicago Reader review:

In an interview in Sight and Sound it was suggested to Haneke that a viewer who wouldn't want to watch or participate in a real act of violence would just walk out of this movie. He agreed, adding, "Anyone who leaves the cinema doesn't need the film, and anybody who stays does." In a statement included in the movie's publicity materials he describes the complicated relationship between representations of violence in both documentaries and fiction and our perceptions of the reality of violence, then spells out his intentions for "Funny Games": "How can I restore to my representation the value of reality which it has lost?...How do I show the viewer his own position in relation to violence and its portrayal?"

"Funny Games" does function, at least in part, as he seems to have intended. Yet I'm not sure this isn't the result of context as much as content. If the movie were programmed at multiplexes, would viewers react any differently than they might to the "Scream" movies? These movies seem to insist that they're doing something other than simply representing a highly codified genre -- the old-hat self-reflexive terror movie -- when in fact that's all they do.

So, I just didn't feel like playing his "Funny Games" -- but, as I said, I eventually completed his abstract experiment in terror and I think it's... a deliberate and provocative exercise in cinematic voyeurism and sadism that tries but fails to rise to its own challenge, which is how to avoid becoming the very thing it's trying to criticize and deconstruct. (Truth is, it feels "old hat." The "Be Black Baby" experimental theater documentary segment of Brian De Palma's 1970 "Hi Mom!" is a far more effective examination/exploitation of the viewer's "position in relation to violence and its portrayal" -- as are Hitchcock's "Rear Window," "Psycho," and "Frenzy," to name a few.)

yeah, that's another good way of putting how his movies make me feel.

but i give the guy credit as a filmmaker. he does a lot of things well. his use of static long shots isn't revolutionary or anything, but he's very smart about it. the pile of burning cattle in Time of the Wolf is a pretty indelible image. i can admire him as a formalist.

gahh. how pedantic. Audiences being asked to pass a test! Who is he to judge. Sounds like an insufferable know-it-all. re: Cronenberg, he isn't pedantic at all, and his films are often very funny.

i don't think the violence in "cache" is working the same way as the violence in "funny games". in "cache" the most unsettling intrusion into the workaday routines of binoche + auteil wasn't the surveillance or violence but the little mistrusts and white lies of the nuclear family rising to the surface.

here is how i read the significance: although majid + georges remain somehow linked, there is very little in the movie into which one can reliably read causality. is it fair for georges to assume majid is behind the tapes? no, of course not. is it fair for the viewer to assume majid's death was caused by georges? also, no of course not.

causality remains murky in life, although our social and class relations and readings of language load our interpretations of events (majid's son is a poor arab - does this influence our reading of his confrontation w/ georges - were you expecting violence? was that a fair expectation?) (similarly, can we lay the blame for events solely on georges and his parents? are majid's parents equally culpable? do i ignore this as a liberal viewer?)

what is maybe clear, though, is that very little can be *said* that can balance, or reverse, or address, or explain, or conclude the events of the film, the enormity of what passes between majid + georges (and his parents), the mistrust opened between georges + his wife and georges' wife + her son. so really, there's no reason to explain or reveal what majid's son says to pierrot, it's enough to show that these plot hasn't been resolved.

i was furious and angry all the way through "funny games". every two or three minutes i'd tell myself i was going to turn the TV off, or put a brick through it or something. at the end, i was like "that was the worst movie i have ever seen".

then when the grindcore music came on in the credits, i realized i had been put on, and the film was really great.

(i like "cache" much much better, FWIW)

I think it was a cop out to have Georges explain what happened between him and Majid during his childhood. Those initial brief shots were brilliant, but the way they were explained didn't live up to that. Somehow, you want to maintain a contrast between nightmare and daily life and the explanation didn't do that. I thought of Un chien andalou. (And on videotape it's paired with a documentary Bunuel made on primitive mountain dwellers who live in extreme poverty - that sort of contrast - though reportage might not be the right style.)

The Haneke test should not only be applied in real life, but also within the work. It should say something about representation within the work, not just in life, and I think focusing exclusively on the lesson you're supposed to walk away with is a mistake. For example, I think it would seem odd to watch the conversation between Georges and his mother again as if it had been recorded, but the film doesn't say anything about its own modes of representation. It isn't reflexive.

yeah, the 4th-wall fucking around in cache doesn't really add up to much. and when georges goes to a movie after the-act-i-won't-mention-even-in-a-spoiler-warning-post, it was such a "did you see what i did there?" moment. agreed that his explanation is unsatisfactory. and whether or not it's deliberately unsatisfactory doesn't really matter to me, because either way it's a weak artistic gesture.

as for the final scene, showing the two boys together is i guess supposed to complicate the story, imply lots of possibilities, but the problem is that none of the possibilities make a lot of sense. the boys cooking up the terror campaign together seems like a ridiculous idea. if majid's son did it all on his own, then the fact that he goes to school with george's son doesn't really add or subtract anything from the narrative. but my real problem is this: it doesn't really seem plausible for any of the characters in the movie to have made the videos and drawings. the movie wants to leave it uncertain -- "hidden" -- but, y'know, there's a thin line between philsophical ambiguity and cop-out. either majid or his son had to be involved in making the videos, because there's no other sensible explanation for the video inside the apartment. but the movie gives some reason to think that both of them are telling the truth when they say they didn't do it. which just leaves haneke himself as the master manipulator, which is not as clever an idea as he thinks. he wants to fuck with the conventions of the thriller, fine by me. but just setting things up and saying, "well, there is no real answer. you see?" is cinematic sophistry.

like i said, the farther away i get from the physical experience of watching his movies, the less interesting they seem to me.

there are probably MANY people who know about majid's story ... i can't imagine he didn't tell at least a few people at the orphanage. the man must be in his fifties or early sixties? he could have told dozens of people (unlike georges, he wouldn't have much to lose in the telling) ... so there could have been any number of people willing to use majid's information against georges.

as for the camera in the apartment ... we are willing to believe that georges could have walked through that alleyway several times without noticing a giant video camera on a tripod on top of a car? (the tripod is visible as a shadow when the car headlights swing past the wall) ... if you can accept that, you can accept somebody snuck into majid's apartment and set up a camera?

I saw it this Friday, and thought it was both very good and disappointing. Here are a few thoughts:

The source of the videotapes is kinda unimportant. If any explanations is needed, I'd say that they're symbolic representations of Georges' own psyche, kinda like the tapes sent to Bill Pullman in Lost Highway (which is where Haneke must've gotten the idea from). This theory is supported by the scene before the last one, where they come to take Majid away: that scene looks exactly like the vidoetapes, yet there's a strong implication Georges is the viewer there. Anyway, the important thing is that they lure the viewer into the film, and that they make Georges finally come into terms with his past, something he should've done a long ago.

To me the main theme of the movie is obviously guilt, and I admire Haneke's skill of not taking sides in the question. What I thought after the film was, should Georges feel guilty for what he did to Majid? He was six years years old, he can't be held fully responsible. So the question has to be a wider one: should Georges feel guilty for how different starting points he and Majid had? Should Frenchmen of today feel guilty for the crimes of their fathers? Should white Europeans feel guilt for the shadow of colonialism and for the subsequent inequality? Like with Georges, the answer is sorta yes and no. Haneke doesn't offer any clear moral, and that I think is the film's strength. This casts some light one the final scene too: we don't know what the relationship between Georges' and Majid's sons is, but we know their story isn't over, the future generation have to face these same questions, though maybe not the way their fathers did.

In the end I thought Caché managed to do what it was attempting to do extremely well, but the attempt itself was misguided. The film wasn't particularly interesting as a mystery or even as a psychological study of a Georges' character. What made it interesting was the link to larger social issues. But, if you want to deal with these issues, why the hell hide them under a metaphoric puzzle that probably only intellectuals and art movie geeks are willing to see and think about? Why put these questions in a film that seems to be aimed only for the leftist academic crowd, the same crowd that already agrees with you? If Haneke really wants to make people think about these issues, he should've made a more straightforward film about them, instead of one which will most likely just make art film fans pat each other on the back for the fact that they "got" it's important themes.

it is very well made. he's got mise en scene coming out his ass. but i think it's too easy for him to just say that ambiguity is the point. ambiguity is not really much of a point, and not nearly as rare or clever as he maybe thinks.

The denouement of this is sub-sub-Antonioni, the abrupt violent shocks are arthouse Cimino, and the Algerian 'political theme' here is just an empty gesture. That said, the acting and formal sizzle are impressive, and I do think Code Unknown and Time of the Wolf are good but flawed films.

is that majid's son approaching pierre at the bottom corner of the steps?

Damn, what do people look at in the movies?

That is all.

Auteuil is fantastic - if for no other reason, I'm glad I saw the film because he and Binoche are utterly HYPERfrancais, and I really enjoyed that. Georges just reflexively lies quite a lot of the time, even when there's no good reason, it seems like the first resort for him is always to make shit up. Is his wife having an affair or not? Didn't anyone else pick up on that?

I suppose Haneke once again fixating on how people react when they're being watched - assuming it's because they've done something wrong.

It's usually a pathetic cop out to say a film was very French, but this one truly is that. Don't know what to say about Majid except that to be not French there it can feel like you don't exist, and that is political, and v important once you picked up on it - Georges had acted like Majid didn't exist, the mother did the same, later on when Majid's son comes to Georges' bureau he gets the same treatment: 'I don't know you, I won't talk to you, you aren't here'.

Is his wife having an affair or not?

I think she is, or at least she HAD one with that guy she has lunch with.

The most straightforwardly entertaining scene is the dog joke at the dinner table (sort of a confession on Haneke's part?).

I really liked it.

Adam have you seen Coming Apart?

0 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
Wowsers!, September 25, 2003
Reviewer: M Hencke (New York, NY United States) - See all my reviewsEasily one of the best independent films ever made. Way ahead of its time. Not for the faint of heart. Anyone interested in psychology should see this film.
Was this review helpful to you?  (Report this)

Yes, went to Lobot. Fantastic show. 10 people there.

I've always had the feeling I would find Haneke's films an absolutely irrelevant bad time, and there's a lot on this thread to make me feel wary about that, but way too many trusted opinions rate his stuff. So if I'm to see one -- which one? The new one?

The other heneke you must see is YEAR OF THE WOLF.

I find the interpretations that the last scene of Cache is "optimistic" fuckin' hilarious.

Only John Waters could've made Piano Teacher work.

john waters doing the piano teacher would have been better. maybe with sharon stone in the lead.

but the ending - very optimistic, isn't it? - was superb.

film comment is provocative, and, i think, correct: 'At the risk of echoing jingoistic cant, Americans exist in a post-9/11 universe, while advanced filmmaking in Donald Rumsfeld’s “Old Europe” often appears parochial or, as he delicately put it, “out of step” with the rough beasts that populate our waking nightmares.'

even the dardennes, and *certainly* people like loach and frears, i think, still exist in an earlier age. there are other euro directors (denis, moll, despleschin) who i like, but only assayas and haneke really seize the present, i think.

The film is not so much about guilt as a lack of acceptance of that guilt: and until there is acceptance (truth and reparations style if necessary) you cannot move on. After all who would really blame Georges for what he did as a six year old. It was affecting but it is a guilt avoided rather than dealt with (partially on both sides - though Georges is too aggressive Majid is potentiall too passive). Who can blame the current French administration for what France did forty years ago? But they can't ignore bad stuff was done.

In a lot of ways it felt more macro than micro regarding France on a world stage. Nevertheless I
a) belong the don't care who sent the Macguffin camp
b) find the ending optimistic.

erk! didn't see that! i onl just noticed them meeting.

However there are shots from the static wide angle viewpoint which are not (necessarily) attributed to the tapes. When Georges picks his son up for the first time, and the dream flashback of Majid being taken away are not (necessarily) on the tapes. Haneke is filming the film, just because the same style is used does not mean anyone else is doing it.

HOWEVER(ii): Just because we don't have a suspect within the film, does not mean there could not be a third party doing this. How hard would it be for a stalker/private eye to discover this secret history? To talk to Majid about it and then set up the whole thing? This is why I don't care I guess, because I think it is external to the films characters. In my allegorical formulation (though this is admittedly pushing it) the tapemaker is an external provocateur, say Al-Quaeda, who suddenly makes it urgent and key to examine things we don't want to think about (perhaps Hanake as the film-maker himself fulfils this role...Actually that is better and nicely recursive as HE ACTUALLY MADE THE TAPES).

i tht it was optimistic not because pierrot and majid's son are good people, but because integrationist french schooling means pierrot won't be able to entirely cut himself off from non-white french society as his dad has.

pete is right about the 'provocateur' angle... i just wanna know who and why. hence the need for a de palma remake.

However is that a school thing, those steps were pretty white, which is a result of the defacto ghettoisation of Paris vis a vis the Banlieus. Of course whatever happens it is pretty clear Majid's son has sought out Georges son, for what end we don't know. My optimism stems from the lack of conflict in that scene.

(Oh, and for those who think becoz he is innit, he did not film it, consider the kind of shots being made. Not very labour intensive. Though I don't think he did it.)

Of course we don't know Majid's sons name. It is possible that he may be the person referred to in that opening sequence. His parents are pretty disengaged with their sons life:
a) run away cry for help
b) liking Eminem
c) the fact they did not ring around all of his friends (did not have numbers?) when he was missing - rule one of the concerned parent handbook.

But then France is not just disengaged with its ex-colonies and their diasporas but also with its youth...

But I also don't understand this adoration for such unremarkable observations: the middle-classes can be racist; colonialism can leave a legacy of guilt. It's like a downpage Guardian editorial. I mean, it looked interesting, but it's hardly taxing.

BUT, despite that, it is a genuinely pacy thriller too. Thus kudos, plus the open endedness.

I love Time Out six star system.

why would majid coughing up blood be a thing that would make george's parents want to get rid of him?

Pete, didn't i see you defending the ****** ratings on the Guardianblog? I was sceptical at first, but as gimmicks go, it's not a bad one.

Henry: was TB partic prevalent at the time? I don't have much history of medicine knowledge.

"Only the audience is complicit--and not in any violence against Arabs. We voyeurs, sitting in the safety of our movie theater, participate imaginatively in the torture of Georges and Anne only. No wonder that this exposé disturbs the conscience so little; no wonder that the film's most ardent admirers have turned out to be people of Georges and Anne's own station. Far from being an expression of liberal guilt (the charge against which some commentators have defended the movie), Caché is an appeal to liberal self-regard."

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20060130/klawans

"Trouble is, Haneke’s technique—calm, Kubrick-precise camera placement—doesn’t disrupt the well-heeled couple’s placidity. (The only hint of realism is a street confrontation between Georges and a menacing African bike messenger.) This reliance on video gimmickry merely toys with shallow social perception similar to Cronenberg’s anti-American neo-noir A History of Violence (except that Georges is too cerebral to kick ass). Cache lacks the genuine political inquiry of Alain Resnais’ 1964 Muriel, which palpably manipulated vision and time as cinematic properties that better examined the moral complexity of France’s then-hot Algerian predicament."

http://www.nypress.com/18/52/film/film1.cfm

Yes, you did see me defending it. I am anti star ratings (or ******* star ratings as I call them), but this if you are going to do it, be uncomparable and use it to give yourself as much free publicity as possible.

Agreed with both, re the hitting its bleeding heart liberal audience over here in the UK (and I have had two UK colonialism/race realtions is better than the French conversations over the weekend). However interesting to see how it played in France, especially during the riots when it came out.

this is haneke's point, in 'funny games'. i actually think the whole 'voyeur' obsession is a liberal parlour game; i like this as a thriller which *does* pose questions about responsibility, honesty, played-out stuff like that.

as i say, the de palma/mann version will 'fix this', in that the audience won't be restricted to dreadful guardian-readers.

Agree with a lot of what Klawans says, especially the rationale of Majid's razor actions. It makes great, shocking cinema: but is it really justified by anything that happens? Really? Equally Georges lousy reaction to it (closest I have got to shouting at a cinema screen in ages.) It is a film full of "Why did you do that?"'s, which perhaps undermines any everyman identification - and pushes the grand allegory more (if suicide is the self destruction of civil war).

I don't get this. Self-regard? For a few, but not many - I mean, it's impossible to me to see Georges and Anne with self-regard in mind. I see them as almost stereotypes of bourgeois intellectuals but very, very Parisian stereotypes - "liberal" from a US perspective is quite different from what they'd call liberal, I think! It seems dishonest to pretend there's some easy identification here, when in fact trying to get a sense of the complex history of France and Algeria & the legacy of that is incredibly difficult for anyone outside the cultures - it'd be like Europeans trying to figure out why the US is still messed up about Vietnam.

(Its exactly the same reasonw hy the Vietnamese are not messed up over it).

which meant i missed the kids meeting up after school. i have to admit that when someone on this thread wrote 'pierre' met majid's son (a typo, i assume they meant pierrot), it became sinister and awesome to me. but not so much now that i know it wasn't the creepy boss/lover and son meeting up to implode the family. sigh.

That said, surely one can use ones own national experiences to try to understand another point of view. Surely this is the whole point of international relations. My view of the American experience of Vietnam is two parts history, one part television, five parts film (of which three parts were made by Oliver Stone so could be suspect) and about three parts talking to Americans, in particular the bunch of US marines I met in Vietnam last year who I had a long chat about it with. I possibly understand more about what happened and why than a lot of Americans who still feel strongly: whether I can feel it or get the mindset is a different question (or if there is a single mindset at all). Worth trying though. Certainly not saying I shouldn't bother. Self-regard in that piece I read as smugness, as a safe-whateverness - which the distance in Hanake's camerawork allows us (also the implausibility of the plot and the potential non-existance of the tapemaker also adds to this effect).

The Armond White piece though seems needlessly hamstrung by excess admiration for Munich, which whilst politically interesting (woo-hoo politics is all about grey areas), is a much more flawed piece of cinematic storytelling (on so many levels it boils down to the Keystone Mossad Asassins). Even if I find Cache politically simplistic and its allegories giant huge, I enjoyed the machinations of the plot.

It is a successful political film as it has made me discuss this issues with people more than I have for years (in particualr French collonialism and its relationship to British and its own people). Does it bring anything but the subject to the party, probably not.

Thinking about it, who knows that Georges felt guilty? White says he does because it fits this "liberal guilt" notion but what I saw in the film wasn't guilt. It was 'you don't exist.' and that struck me as what goes on in France right up to now - those riots, I read some people saying this is those young people's way of saying, we are here, we exist. Georges' mother didn't think about Majid at all, and I didn't see any evidence that Georges actually felt guilty for doing something wrong, it was more Georges' refusal to acknowledge that there was such a person - I thought what was unspoken from Majid was simply "look, I exist," and Georges didn't understand that he didn't want anything more than this.

And again, maybe a cultural difference.. as an American, in Paris it troubled me a lot the degree to which the "you don't exist" attitude was taken. Go to a place where you're obviously not wealthy/fashionable enough and don't belong? You don't exist. Someone you don't know tries to talk to you on the street? You have to pretend they don't exist.

This is not an idea Americans encounter at the multiplex very often. I don't dig formalism much, so Munich kicks Cache's ass.

The whole 'integration' reading of Pierrot meeting Majid's son (was he given a name, btw?) never occurred to me til I read of it -- I saw it as racism trumped by Sons Hate Fathers, or Haneke taking the piss.

this is certainly one thing that haneke allows you to think; but really we don't know how georges feels about colonialism as a whole -- maybe he has confronted france's guilt (i don't think he thought the police killing 200 north africans was a good thing). the reason he won't tell anne what he did as a child is not because this 'says something' about who he is, but because he's scared it will make him look racist. like most western borgeois people almost nothing could be worse than being thought of as racist.

Morbius, I agree that Munich's has better politics, but Cache was a better film. And that's what I paid to see.

For what its worth White might be right (at night) with the way other nationalities deal with Cache, but not the French I think.

liar.

Re: the final shot on the steps: I though this scene was rather ambivalent. It wasn't even 100% clear to me that it was Majid's son that Pierrot was talking to - though it looked like him. If he was talking to him, I think the implication has to be that it can't be a good thing - because whether Majid's son was himself responsible for the tapes or not, he clearly still felt that Georges was responsible for his father's death - so I would guess that whatever he is saying to Pierrot can't be happy. Perhaps he is driving a further wedge between Pierrot and his parents. (A wedge that we saw earlier in the scene where Pierrot briefly goes missing - which, btw, never seemed to be completely explained. It was kind of left as a lose end whether Anne was indeed having an affair or what led Pierrot to suspect it. I initially thought that Pierrot's suspicion might have been the result of intervention by Majid (or his son) - ie., maybe he had been surveilling Anne as well and had passed a tape to Pierrot of a tryst between Anne and the friend, but the film didn't end up going that way.)

Re: the political content: Certainly the film deals with political issues (and issues of race and class), but I'd stop short of trying to read it as a direct allegory. Georges' shameful secret is constructed to parallel the Western colonial experience in some ways, but I think the parallels act mainly on an emotional level, and trying to make the situations exactly equivalent as political or ethical allegory would be a mistake. I think that what the film does is to pinpoint those emotions and poke them with a sharp stick.

Re: the ambiguity about who sent the tapes: I think it has to have been either Majid or his son. Any other reading seems implausible in the extreme (and the film never suggests any other possibility). We can debate why the filmmmaker decided to leave this question unresolved, but I don't think it was just ambiguity for the sake of ambiguity. I think it has more to do with preventing the audience from making tidy conclusions about blame and innocence.

Overall I found the film quite entertaining and gripping. I think I even liked it more than Munich (which apart from the fact that both deal with political issues of the post-colonial aftermath, is not really all that similar).

"People are only asking, 'whodunnit?' because I chose to use the genre, the structure of a thriller, to address the issues of blame and conscience, and these methods of narrative usually demand an answer. But my film isn't a thriller and who am I to presume to give anyone an answer on how they should deal with their own guilty conscience?"

http://observer.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,,1712723,00.html

See, I told you it was bullshit!

and making a thriller with no resolution isn't smart, it's facile.

maybe he should only work from other people's scripts.

i just thought: what is majid's motivation for killing himself?

3 Why swimming?

Pierrot swims for his school and in one scene wins a race, which delights his parents who are attending the gala... Does the water perhaps signify a sort of religious motif of ritual cleansing? Does it connect to the drownings of more than 200 Algerians in the River Seine?

Haneke says: 'We chose swimming because the young actor who plays Pierrot can swim well.'

Bang goes half of Geoff Andrews' next BFI Classic.

Bang goes half of Geoff Andrews' next BFI Classic.

oh! zing!

you like stanley kubricks!

re the Observer interview, the only reason I'd rent the DVD is to memorize the dog joke.

You live in a dream world in which art houses don't instead choose to play The World's Fastest Indian or Mrs. Henderson Presents on two screens.

So is Haneke another one of these auteurs - eg David Lynch - who doesn't do DVD commentaries? I would've thought he cld have had much meta-deconstructional-alienating fun w/ em

yr dvd player might have a region-zero hack innit?

i've actually read about 3/4 of the way down this massive thread-thing and Pete I want to tell you that I had the exact same thought re: the vids = Al-Qaeda - I had heard nothing about this film before, and not read this thread .. that was in the first half, though, during the whodunit part, before it slid sideways into the family, and then the past. i get very caught up in movies so these allegorical concordances didn't dominate the way i watched it (which appears to unfortunately have happened for some here).

there are a few movies i've seen, very few, where after it's over and you go to the restroom you have this silent, still alertness and every sound seems as if it's being soundtracked, recorded somewhere, like you're still living in the vessel of the movie you've just seen and this was one. yi-yi was another one. actually caché has a GREAT DEAL of what i like about modern taiwanese movies (like edward yang, and whoever it was that did "vive l'amour"), i.e. the patience and the generous gift of time to the actors i.e. no interference from some swelling underscore i.e. ambiguous and potential non-sequitur shots living organically but uneasily in the framework of a relatively conventional shooting and editing style ... the shot that really stuck with me was when georges comes down the stairs in the morning, at his mother's house, the one who he so seldom visits and to whom he so rarely has anything to say, after waking from a frightening dream about the son he denied his parents (and the brother he denied himself), about - we think - to eat a little breakfast with her before setting off to some other book junket - but he's wearing his jacket and he's got his bag with him - and he opens the door to the room across from hers, and the camera swings up behind him so we can see the room, too: a old chair, and end table, light coming in through the window - but the camera has just lurched so queasily that with georges' vaguely "wrong" attire we fear something bad is about to happen - but he shuts the door, and opens his mother's. what was he thinking in that shot? we don't know - we never get inside anyone's head - no one's - in the entire movie, and this scene is no different, but it provides the space for us to see he's thinking, that he's collecting himself - whatever - and that space - for the actors, for us, to charge with our ideas and thoughts or even actions - is what great art creates

basically i'm with vahid and Pete and youn and the others who liked it. i liked it, too.

i did think it was strange for pierrot to bring up pierre. at that age it's hard to imagine him thinking about his parents' infidelities. did someone tape the scene at the café between pierre and binoche? maybe you wouldn't watch the scene on pierrot's bed between he and his mom on tape, youn, but the movie at least suggests there are tapes we don't know about, maybe even incorporated as normal edits in the movie which we're seeing as non-diegetic so it does interrogate itself to an extent (and the link is made early: when you realize that the first shot's both surveillance and the detection/analysis of that surveillance (by the people who were being surveilled!))

there's just something so generous about movies like this. him dropping the coin, picking it up, buying the coffee, sipping it ... like i said way up at the top of this mammoth post-bloc here, the subtlety of movies like this - if you get into em - sharpens your senses, makes you hyper-tuned to sound, movements, glances - i don't have patience to do a thorough survey of the thread first-hand but i wonder if it's the people who weren't real into it who missed the meeting at the end? by the end i felt myself so aware of little details that the meeting between the two didn't seem "hidden" at all, it was glaring. of course we can't know what's been said, but it's clearly a friendly conversation, although even if you believe majid's son is totally clear of anything to do with the tapes - which i do - the relationship between the two boys - despite their best intentions - is about as history-laden as it can get (cf. france/algeria)

but gypsy, it's the French way! any movie with a big thumping resolution - happy or sad - the lovely Emma B kind of snorts and says "so American."

-- Tracey Hand (tracerhan...), April 6th, 2006.

no it isn't the french way! and this was *nothing* like 'yi-yi'. this was a suspense film!!

i can tell from reading this thread that haneke is one of those directors people strongly about, mainly anti-, and i know exactly the feeling. i doubt i could ever watch a gaspar noe and film or a lars von trier movie and like it. the diff for me with caché is that i've barely heard of haneke, never seen any of his movies. surely the violence in caché is anything but "porno" or whatever? if you think otherwise, do you have any way of explaining what you mean w/o resorting to talking about earlier movies? one reason most of the reviews i've read have been so terrible is that they keep talking about "haneke" and not the actual movie so much

I'm not sure quite what you mean by this. The only interpretation I can come up with is that Haneke is trying to say that violence is bad but he's also reveling in it. Is that it? There may be something to that. A simultaneous attraction/repulsion. I guess that is a normal human response - the same reason that people slow down to gawk at a traffic accident. Perhaps it's not a highly evolved response, but it's genuinely human. My only exposure to Haneke is "Cache", but based on the (very few) scenes of violence in that, it seems that Haneke like to shock us with bloody images, but he also aestheticizes them in a way that suggests he gets off on them. But he's certainly got lots of company in that regard, including Scorsese, Tarantino among many others. So I'm not convinced that it's a flaw in his style.

i don't have patience to do a thorough survey of the thread first-hand but i wonder if it's the people who weren't real into it who missed the meeting at the end? by the end i felt myself so aware of little details that the meeting between the two didn't seem "hidden" at all, it was glaring.

it seemed glaring to me too, for the same reason. but the friend i saw it with was also quite into it (judging from our 3-day running discussion of the movie after walking out) and somehow missed the meeting entirely.

this is SO tired, isn't it? it kind of harks back to kracauer on one hand and john cage/warhol on the other, but it's just the film politics of resentment; everything has to be the opposite of mainstream narrative filmmaking.

something potentially bothersome about the clarity of the film's political analogy is that is shows absolutely everything from the point of view of georges and his family. majid's entire story remains a cipher. the videotape of the reverse angle of majid's apartment, for instance, is at first presented as "another angle" on the argument that had taken place in his apartment. i really am gullible and get caught up in the movies, like i mentioned, so maybe some of haneke's techniques worked on me better than they did on others, but i initially read that angle as majid's sid eof the story. "wow," i thought. we were finally going to see the other side! we had broken out of georges' viewpoint! but no - the scene we were watching was being watched and manipulated by georges and binoche on the home video player.

xpost nrique r u srs?? cache is a pretty mainstream film

whoever it was that did "vive l'amour"

That was Tsai Ming-liang, Tracer, definitely see his others -- the last two esp, but all the ones centered on Lee Kang-sheng and leaky plumbing. (and his new one's at BAM on the 15th)

I just can't see Cache as anything but a parlor game (or more on point, a shaggy dog joke told at dinner) that's set up to be unresolvable, and so a regression from Code Unknown and Time of the Wolf.

xpost

how does 'crimson gold' subvert the thriller plot? it's just a neo-realist thriller.

like when majid's son comes to georges' work and is given the brushoff, he steps in the elevator, confronts georges outside the glass of his office-sanctum, george reacts in his usual totally frustrating way and steps inside. we see the son step up to the glass and look in at this banal scene of comfortable, casual, western work life. we are ready for something maudlin, the son turning away from the glass in either fury or sadness - but he opens the door. he won't let it go. he's trying so hard to make the connection both his father and george never managed to make (and pete bang on the money about majid's total failure to communicate as well - the meetings between the two just drove me up the wall, as i think they were supposed to, in the two men's total failure to make any sort of human connection)

No, because my point is about Haneke's body of work. Cache doesn't step outside of that.

O. Nate -- you've got my point more or less, although I think Haneke's work tries to be about the fetishization of visualized violence in a way that strikes me as nastily moralizing (i.e. "You're all gore porn hounds and I bet I can make you watch ANYTHING"). Scorsese and Tarentino put their moralizing elsewhere, and don't really want us to feel bad about OURSELVES AS VIEWERS after their bloodbaths (Tarentino fails at this sometimes, though).

xpost

By starting with the climax is all I was thinking of. I think it's a character study, not any kind of thriller at all (not even as much as Taxi Driver).

xpost

true, and that makes haneke exciting to watch. like i said up at the top, i tend to think he's great while i'm experiencing his movies. it's also what makes his sudden bursts of violence so shocking -- like unexpected blasts of distortion when you've got the volume turned way up. but in this case anyway, i think all that subtlety and sharpening was in service of not very much. i think it's easy to mistake haneke's skill for insight. does the movie really offer an incisive view of family life? compared to, i don't know, ozu? or even to the squid and the whale?

and i don't buy the "it's french" excuse for the lack of resolution. he's not, for one thing. but also, real french thrillers (like claude chabrol's) are generally better constructed than hollywood thrillers, not worse. haneke borrowed the form of the thriller to make something else, which is fine. i just don't think it particularly worked. the questions he raises and ambiguities he explores just aren't interesting enough.

I'm not so sure. The sudden huge spurt of blood when the guy slits his own throat, thrown in ultra-vivid dark red relief against the bare white wall. Seems pretty fetishistic to me. And the crayon drawings of the kid coughing up blood, combined with the nightmare visions of same. Again, he seems to dwell on it and aestheticize it more than would be absolutely necessary.

Is that why Haneke says it, too? (Feb 21 post)

xpost

"the idea that you can get out of a war or entrenched postcolonial inequality by solving a whodunit is the kind of childish thinking we need to get past"

er, who said we could do that?

but in this case anyway, i think all that subtlety and sharpening was in service of not very much. i think it's easy to mistake haneke's skill for insight. does the movie really offer an incisive view of family life? compared to, i don't know, ozu? or even to the squid and the whale?

if cache fails to offer an incisive view of family life that stands up to ozu, has it failed as a film? i liked it because i found it extremely entertaining as a thriller while i was watching it, and the lack of traditional resolution effectively turned my focus back to the other issues being addressed (quite effectively) throughout it - only one of which was the ease with which the outwardly healthy family turns against itself.

xpost: haha THE PEOPLE IN MY HEAD SAID IT.

It would have been easy not to. Why did Majid have to kill himself in such a vivid and bloody and aesthetic way? Why didn't he just raise a gun to his head, and then the screen blacks out as we hear the shot? No sight of blood at all in that case. Or it could have all have happened off-camera and been related to us in exposition. No, Haneke wants us to appreciate his skill in creating artistic visions of violence.

for the camera! [= key theme of film]

Or it could have all have happened off-camera and been related to us in exposition. No, Haneke wants us to appreciate his skill in creating artistic visions of violence.

erm, this is kind of hilarious if you think about it.

also, wasn't it supposed to be implied that we were watching that scene through a diegetic hidden camera? or at least that we could have been? if it were to black out just before the death, that would have been too much of an intrusive directorial move, i think, and it would have broken the illusion of the impartial, unmanned camera.

haha, see my second post at the very top.

actually if the movie had been called "less than meets the eye," it would be well nigh unassailable.

I think a lot of the negative reactions about Haneke's aesthetized violence that "daringly" implicates the audience is a response more to Haneke's "body of work" (especially Funny Games), where that sort of reasoning functions in the manner Colin Meeder describes.

I haven't seen anything predating Funny Games, and I'll sooner be renting the new DVD of Triumph of the Will.

Maurice Bénichou as Majid is incredible - there's so much intelligence in that 5 or 6 minute performance and so many layers that we feel he' telling us everything about himself in the way that he opens his palms in confusion at Georges sudden appearance or looks at the floor with (resigned) shame at the state Georges has found him in. That's not because the character is a cipher or a "chess piece", as Morbius states, but because in that brief appearance, the actor does something quite amazing in making Majid's innocence absolutely unequivocal. he's too tired and crushed by his life to be anything other than totally passive towards Georges' accusations which is perhaps why he invites him back to witness his suicide, in order to empower himself in georges eyes again and regain the upper hand.

haha xpost exactly

i think it has the kind of ambiguity and space you liked in Caché.

this wouldn't be aestheticizing it?

I think the word aestheticized is wrong, because everything in films (and art in general) follows an aesthetic. The point is whether the aesthetic serves a purpose, whether or not the violence in gratuitious. In this film I didn't think it was.

This ending is not a mystery, because it doesn’t have a solution, only multiple, intimated causes. The plot of Michael Haneke’s Caché, on the other hand, is a mystery, because it has several solutions, all dull. The dullest is the one the director himself seems to prefer: there is no solution, and only unsophisticated viewers will worry about such things, instead of concentrating on the big historical themes. I got the theme of the Algerian War and the way the past can revisit the present, but I confess I also continued to worry about the mystery and its solution. Why is this well-to-do French couple (he’s a TV presenter, she’s a publisher, they live in a lovely boutique apartment) so panicky? Who has been sending them strange drawings, and videotapes of pieces of their lives? Actually, we don’t really know they’re panicky, because they manage only to look vaguely cross throughout the movie. Clearly the actors, Daniel Auteuil and Juliette Binoche, have been carefully coached, or have coached themselves, in the idea that anomie among the chattering classes looks like indigestion. Still, we gather it’s all to do with what Auteuil did when he was six: he betrayed an Algerian boy, who was then taken away by the authorities. There is one terrific scene in the movie, and it’s worth seeing for that alone. A middle-aged Algerian, the betrayed boy grown older, commits suicide before our eyes with a sudden, startling slash of a razor, and for a moment something of the complexity we need hovers before us. This man is dying not because of something that has happened to him but because of everything that has happened to him. But then the film gets back to its old pace, its gimmicks and delay: too slow and too easy.

that bit's good but otherwise it's nonsense especially this:

"Actually, we don’t really know they’re panicky, because they manage only to look vaguely cross throughout the movie. Clearly the actors, Daniel Auteuil and Juliette Binoche, have been carefully coached, or have coached themselves, in the idea that anomie among the chattering classes looks like indigestion. "

OffTM, but i'm sure it made him laugh when he read it.

I agree with Tuomas that "aestheticized" is perhaps not the best word to describe what Hanneke does with the violence in this film - it's too general, since filming anything "aestheticizes" it - just like hanging something on a wall in an art gallery makes it necessary to examine it in the context of art. However, I would still argue that there is something "gratuitous" about Hanneke's love affair with blood in this movie - this doesn't mean it's in bad taste, just that there seems to be some attraction mixed in with the repulsion.

I really need to know more about the French/Algerian shared history than what I learned by watching The Battle of Algiers, although that was a decent starting point.

also it's interesting that no one's mentioned lost highway -- a movie with a lot of problems of its own, god knows, but one that i think used the mysterious-videotapes device better.

HE WAS SIX

Saying "It was a stupid childhood prank" isn't the same as admitting you're sorry you did it. It's almost a lame "boys will be boys" writeoff of repulsive behavior. Yeah, kids will be jerks but that doesn't mean you should never tell people about regret or remorse.

Also, like I said, I though it was a deliberate choice to make George six when he did what he did, so it would be kinda ambiguous whether he should feel guilt or not - just like it's ambiguous whether or not we should feel guilt for colonialism.

oops, yeah you did.

i think the issue of georges' age is important, because it goes to how flimsy a vehicle haneke has constructed. i have a problem with the idea of a 6-year-old being forever accountable for his actions, either as a case study or as a metaphor, and i also have a problem with the idea that majid's life was destroyed by not being allowed to grow up in an upper-middle-class white family, again as either case study or metaphor. it just doesn't hang together.

I can't say, having only seen the 5 recent features, but Ed Gonzalez at Slant wonders too (last item):

http://www.slantmagazine.com/blog/default.asp?view=plink&id=286

Very very OTM.

Obviously the film is an imperfect allegory of colonial history. If what you're looking for is a watertight historico-political thesis, then yes, you will be disappointed. What the film is is a meditation on guilt - and all it needs to do is to get close enough to the psychological wellsprings of that guilt to tickle those raw nerve endings. People are trying to read this movie as a moral allegory - that's a very unsatisfying way to experience the film.

I'm willing to accept that.

See, that's not what I got at all. He's not really accountable for anything more than one stupid mistake when he was a kid. Majid doesn't seem to harbor ill will, it's just very trying to him that this man has come back in his life and is making all these accusations. This man who was there for the worst part of Majid's life returns and accuses him of horrible things. Majid's life wasn't ruined -- did his son even say that in the confrontation at the end?

Georges is really absolutely horrid about the whole thing. He never even considers that Majid isn't responsible for the videos until he realizes there's a son, then he blames the son. Majid just wants to sit down and talk. That's it. Despite Georges working as an interviewer and discussion moderator on television, he can't even get through a minute's conversation with either of them.

I didn't really like this either ... I don't think I have any insights that haven't already been covered in depth on this thread (plus I haven't read the whole thing) but the movie felt condescending to me .... I get the feeling Haneke is just getting off on making people deconstruct a whodunit that has no answers. I don't mind confusing plots (usually love em, actually) but I don't think this one plays fair. And the racial/social "insights" seem less than profound (immigrants got it rough).

Tracer is OTM about the weird feeling/almost-unavoidable quiet reflection the film engenders, mainly I think due to that last scene (almost like the feeling of leaving Playtime in reverse [yeah, yeah I know these "feelings" aren't universal reactions, etc..., affective fallacy blah blah, but I don't think this is TOTALLY lone subjectivity]). I need to think a little more about how everything fits together before I can comment on if the films *works* (i.e. discussions about consistancy of character movitvation etc), but if nothing else (and I think to piece all of this together it DOES matter who sent the tapes, maybe), the film is effective in prompting worthwhile thinking about the kind of collective guilt and responsibility involved in the France/Algeria questions (and, more broadly, similar issues in diff. countries). Whether this is all it does, I'm not sure (well, I do think at the very least it's also very entertaining and "well directed") and if this is all it does, I can certainly understand why it may not meet "good film" criteria for some people.

Has anyone told the dog joke at a party?

One former defense official, who still deals with sensitive issues for the Bush Administration, told me that the military planning was premised on a belief that “a sustained bombing campaign in Iran will humiliate the religious leadership and lead the public to rise up and overthrow the government.” He added, “I was shocked when I heard it, and asked myself, ‘What are they smoking?’"

http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/articles/060417fa_fact

http://www.dvdactive.com/news/releases/tartan-boxed-sets.html

4th December

Michael Haneke Trilogy

With the box-office success of Hidden and imminent production to begin in his English-language remake of the classic Funny Games, Michael Haneke has established himself as a dramatic auteur on the world cinema stage. His three earliest films are set to be released on DVD for the first time, all of them reflecting on the media’s influence on our lives. The 7th Continent (1989) offers a chilling take on contemporary society as a successful young couple decide to commit kill themselves and their daughter. Benny’s Video (1992) darkly tells of a teenager’s obsession with violent movies leads to murder whilst 71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance (1994) recounts a hypnotic series of events which connect back to a motiveless murder. A trio of disturbing dramas. (RRP £39.99)

little disappointed tho not surprised that 95% of this thread is concerned w/the thematic aspects of hanekes movies - predictably ignoring his best qualities.

even if he was a pedophilia or dave mathews band advocate guy would still deserve to be appreciated as complete virtuoso. to pull the kinda of fourth wall fucking and heavy handed judgment he does and still hold an audience is crazily impressive. its almost like hes just challenging himself - making a straight thriller would be too easy - tho id rather watch that.

i love his ill equipped characters falling prey to their own bad intentions laziness and willful alienation. but and heres where the being a really great filmmaker comes in these mistakes are portrayed so precisely you cant help but feel for the bewildered people surrounded by bad choices.

btw ron howard remake not on imdb :( was looking forward to some sweet opie cunningham style resolution

well like i say way upthread, i respect his chops. he's very good at tension and unease, and at ratcheting them up to full-blown dread. but i think he mistakes his willingness to punish characters and viewers for some kind of artistic boldness.

being all yah yah i respect his chops but omg i hate the subtext is a little weird when the practical effect of said chops is completely engrossing movies. its preferring thinking abt the movie afterward to the actual experience of seeing it.

while someone's punching me in the face it's easy to be impressed by the fact that he's punching me in the face. but afterward it's more like, wtf why was that dude punching me in the face? i still haven't seen a few of his better-loved movies, so i can believe that in some cases the meaning keeps pace with the means. (my favorite of the ones i've seen is time of the wolf, which i think is coherent and probably better than the movie of the road will be.)

and it's not his subtexts i have issues with, it's his texts. at least in cache and the piano teacher, he seems overly impressed with the toughness and "honesty" of his stories and approach. he's as didactic as von trier, but at least von trier's funny sometimes.

(also i recently found out i've always mispronounced his name, like HAN instead of HAHN.)

wtf? i hope heneke wont approve
http://defamer.com/hollywood/trade-roundup/trade-round+up-ron-howard-seriously-considering-ruining-cache-for-american-audiences-238221.php

and it's not his subtexts i have issues with, it's his texts. at least in cache and the piano teacher, he seems overly impressed with the toughness and "honesty" of his stories and approach. he's as didactic as von trier, but at least von trier's funny sometimes.

-- tipsy mothra, Sunday, July 6, 2008 10:54 AM (31 minutes ago) Bookmark Link

its not that i disagree w/this - just im surprised people arent more impressed w/his craft - which imo is completely masterful and not at all like being punched in the face - ok maybe a few face punches a movie but theres lots of other styles of contact there too

its a flawed brilliance im totally cool with

this thread! bloody hell. i'm pleased i didn't read or even encounter it till i'd seen the film.

***SPOOOOOILERS AHEAD***

one thing though: i seem to have read the final scene in a totally different way from everyone else. I saw the meeting of the two sons as entirely sinister, like somehow Pierrot will meet the same fate, i.e. death as Majid. The thought that the two may be friends or at least in cahoots didn't occur to me till i read this thread - in my head was revenge, pure and simple.

Also, fourth wall where? I somehow missed that bit.

4th wall is sort of broken by having our POV be the same as the stalker and also the same as auteil and binoche watching the video - with the weird consequence that we "are" both characters. but yeah nobody ever turns to the camera and goes "hey you!" or anything.

didn't the conversation seem friendly to you?

The conversation itself might've seem cordial, but I can't imagine they were discussing anything savory.

the conversation was of course impossible to discern in any detail, but my initial impression was that it was majid's son talking to pierrot for maybe the second or third time, getting to know him, becoming his friend via whatever means (swimming? why not?) only to do something awful to him at some later point.

my point is, the idea of them collaborating - or rather, having already collaborated - to create the tapes, say, never crossed my mind. my thought was "oh god, revenge really is sweet isn't it?"

i still think i'm right.

It would be super-evil of him to feign a friendly relationship, only to POUNCE when the kid is unawares..

Well, he thinks Pierrot's dad is responsible for the ruined life and subsequent death of his father, which I think is pretty good motivation for doing precisely that!

tit for tat, innit.

That's why I think the ending is brilliant because for ALL Algerians that motivation is there. But do you act on it? Or do you chalk it up to the sins of a previous generation? Or somewhere inbetween?

Morbs says

the Algerian 'political theme' here is just an empty gesture

I mean, i think that couldn't be more wrong - if anything the movie's TOO bound up in allegory and parallels. The Algerian political theme is the backbone of the entire story.

to me the characters didn't exist apart from Haneke's theses.

"Theses.... a storee about a man.. and zee guilt of a generation"

tracer i think the point is that he could have switched it with most any national shame and the plot mechanics would have worked as well.

not sure if that's a criticism.

but fuck this guy, anyways.

"my name is, er, Majid's son, your father kill my father... prepare to die!"

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i3W5GDkgf2w

Everybody hates on this guy so much that I've been afraid to watch any of his other films, even though this is one of my favorites ever. I think I'm going to stick to that.

^ same!

wait, not true, i watched and liked code unknown as well

ok i gotta see that.

i like what jhøshea says.

was the ron howard thing a joke?

sadly not: http://www.timeout.com/film/news/1722/howard-tackles-hidden.html

oh wait, that was 18 months ago. maybe it's now bullshit. it's been removed from his wiki, for what it's worth.

The Algerian political theme is the backbone of the entire story.

it is. what i said about being punched in the face upthread should maybe be revised to, being whacked with a billboard.

has anybody given a name yet to this european crop of grim left-wing moralists? haneke, von trier, breillat... i haven't seen irreversible, so i don't know if that qualifies. i like some of their movies (and love a few of von trier's), but they sure do exemplify that whole smug-euro-lefty thing. they share this assurance that they're telling you something really important about human nature that obviously you're not smart or honest enough to know or admit to knowing so they're going to MAKE YOU CONFRONT IT.

what do you think the really obvious thing about human nature is in caché, that haneke's showing us?

that could have been worded better but hopefully you know what i am asking

oh i guess "your life is a lie," more or less. with the implicated you in this case being comfortable euro-liberal affluence, altho as morbs implied you could substitute a lot of scenarios within the same moral framework. i get the sense that the key for haneke is to have someone to rebuke.

and i have no problem rebuking euro-liberal affluence. i just don't think haneke has anything very interesting to say about it.

("your life is a lie" seems sort of like his abiding theme. there's something kind of adolescent about it, like a 15-year-old who's just discovered hypocrisy.)

my point is, the idea of them collaborating - or rather, having already collaborated - to create the tapes, say, never crossed my mind. my thought was "oh god, revenge really is sweet isn't it?"

-- CharlieNo4

its been a long while since ive seen this, but what do you think the point of all the family discord was?

i was kinda disappointed that scene of 'shocking violence' in this movie i read so much about was so cinematic

I thought he was talking about guilt and revenge, the consequences of colonial exploitation, and the failure of shocking violence to produce desired results (among other things). Though he didn't appear to have any answers to these questions.. much less did he attempt to rub our noses in his solutions. I thought Auteil's character was an affluent liberal just because it helps tell those stories, rather than the point of the movie itself. His life wasn't a lie, it was just very.. uncommunicative and sort of helpless.

The more I think about it, parts of this movie remind me of Kill Bill.

ha which parts?

its been a long while since ive seen this, but what do you think the point of all the family discord was?

i think the wife/mum was indeed having/had indeed had an affair, and haneke was using that as a smokescreen to make us think pierrot was somehow involved in the tapes/drawings. their marriage is unhappy because it deserves to be - and they don't deserve their son, who they're neglecting anyway. it's a revenge movie, pure and simple.

well, not simple, but anyway.

i think of those two as basically diametrically opposed as films, which im guessing is sorta somehow where youre going w/ that xp

im gonna have to watch this again tonight i stold it from blockbuster

Well, the parts that make you think about the morality and emotional utility of grudges and revenge.

I thought he was talking about guilt and revenge, the consequences of colonial exploitation, and the failure of shocking violence to produce desired results (among other things).

well guilt obviously. i'm not sure it's so much about revenge, except inasmuch as the lingering sense of guilt (compounded by the suicide) becomes its own revenge. but right, all that guilt and exploitation and the lingering effects of it all underlie, directly or indirectly, this whole bourgeois life of supposedly enlightened liberal ethicism. which i guess i thought, yes ... and?

in some ways i think there's some thematic intersection with a history of violence -- the way daily life is kind of a facade papered over unacknowledged horror -- but i thought history of violence was smarter. (and funnier, not that "funny" is really something haneke was shooting for.)

what do you think the point of all the family discord was?

i think it echoes the other storyline. the inability to be honest, or try to speak honestly, about things as they are (or were). whether she's actually having an affair or not is less important than his inability to confront the possibility.

(to call it a revenge film, you have to assign some kind of authorship to the videos, which haneke -- oh so meta-cleverly -- refuses to do. unless you say it's possibly auteil's conscience taking its own revenge on him.)

auteuil, that is

yeah that jogged me enough to remember that guiltguiltguiltguilt was definitely the central theme, it was all about passivity not action - revenge/kill bill is active, cache is passive

I'd call Majid's suicide a kind of revenge. And Majid's son is certainly after.. justice, if not quite retribution (though he may be after that too)

I guess what I'm saying is that the anomie of leisure liberalism seems less like Haneke's target of critique and more like a detail that adds depth and character to the story

xpost

the one true act of violence is passive in & of itself, if you want to get all theoretical (& spoilery) - i expected it to be a murder or something, instead its an act of suicide, which totally fits into what tipsy's saying

his suicide is a kind of revenge but only because he's fully playing on the other guys sense of guilt - he's turning the knife on himself instead of on him, which is like i said diametrically opposed to kill bill

this is an interesting ying/yang kinda thing i gotta admit

"has anybody given a name yet to this european crop of grim left-wing moralists? haneke, von trier, breillat"

grim euro-lefty moralists of course isn't anything very new. I suppose if it hasn't been given a name in the 60s no one is gonna bother now, when this kind of thing is scarce. Don't care about von trier or Breillat.

I was watching a discussion about 'The wire' yesterday (fifth season about to be broadcast here on some cable channel), and the panel talked about how unflinching it is, how it goes on to tell the viewer how everything is basically fucked blah blah and how you can miss things easily. Now I like 'The wire' a lot but I ended up w/this reaction of 'so what? I already think some of this, I'm cynical enough'. What's good about 'The wire' its HOW it says dramatizes these things.

The same applies to a film like Hidden, dramatizing a set of conflicts that are still there, but its the way he expresses them in a way that I think I haven't quite come across before.

If you're gonna see 'Code Unknown' go on to see '71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance' as well.

just saw this

technically pretty brilliant, i thought. but this is pretty otm

("your life is a lie" seems sort of like his abiding theme. there's something kind of adolescent about it, like a 15-year-old who's just discovered hypocrisy.)

― tipsy mothra, Thursday, July 17, 2008 11:08 AM (1 month ago) Bookmark

and even though i missed it the first time around, going back to watch the final scene made me think that it was majid's son behind everything, not pierrot. their interaction is one-sidedly cordial---Majid's son is acting friendly and bro-y while pierrot seems sort of impassive, like he's being sold something. my guess is that majid's son is who suggested to pierrot that his mom was cheating.

why does the old algerian kill himself?

lol

i just thought: what is majid's motivation for killing himself?

― The Man Without Shadow (Enrique), Wednesday, February 22, 2006 2:42 PM (3 years ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

Anyone read Anthony Lane's slavish profile in the current New Yorker?

http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20100113/REVIEWS08/100119986

ok so what shot is he talking about? i don't really feel like renting again this just to see.

whoa, pardon my yoda syntax...

the one in the picture of the article, I believe.

hmm still not getting it

20 minutes in.. i don't remember anything particularly

look on the couch, what do you see there

a black shape - maybe my laptop screen just ain't up to it

btw DON'T TELL ME, this is one of the few DVDs i own, i'm a gonna go to the place mr ebert told me to

guy on the criterion forums says it's this one, but i don't see how anyone could miss that shot on the first time through much less the second. iirc the question of whether majid really was coughing up blood is left hanging like a lot of other things in the movie. i don't see what that shot's supposed to resolve.

(oops sorry tracer, didn't mean to spoil. but maybe you can confirm that's what ebert's talking about.)

yes, i find it bizarre that he could miss that shot on two viewings.

I saw it last night, incidentally, also for the third time. I noticed it, and pretty sure I did the second time around also. Although then again, after reading that article I examined the picture on it thinking an actual handgun was in the frame...

haha

http://www.culturesnob.net/2010/01/still-hidden/

part of the general maelstrom of post-ebert confusion

I doubt Roger Ebert's actually talking about the shot with young Majid,

Even though I'm content to leave the who-did-what of the film entirely ambiguous, and even allow the possibility that no one's actually sending the tapes, that it (this being a film after all) functions as something entirely symbolic, and that the suspense is too engaging and stimulating for its own good. On the other hand, cough it up Ebert!

really think haneke should have hired professor irwin corey to accept his golden globe tonight.

Who says he didn't?

Loved that they cut to the Governator during Haneke's speech. A fellow Austrian craftsman makes good!

i just watched this again the other day.

is it possible that georges made the tapes? he is a little crazy! it didn't take long for him to threaten that young man on the bike, he doesn't want to go to the police, he lies constantly, he's the one who works in tv production and around cameras all day, his own mother doesn't know him well, majid has no clue why he shows up there, he is so certain to state that majid is terrorizing him and tries to provoke majid into attacking him, and it doesn't work. it also struck me that at the end walid is extremely polite and dignified and (i think?) telling the truth, while georges flips out, and it is perhaps stereotypical expectations & the fact that the film is focused on georges' perspective that let us overlook how unsympathetic and untrustworthy he is..

also there seems to be a very convenient spot on the upper back window of his car for hiding a camera, doesn't there? what's the thing on the back window of the car @ that shot ebert is talking about?

if the shot is bleeding-mouth kid it only proves what we already know: that the tapes and pix have s.thing to do with majid and/or his son.

don't think rodge has really solved the mystery.

i don't entirely understand why majid kills himself, but haven't seen it in four years.

he feels his entire future was stolen at age five by one lie. georges' reappearance must have brought all those old feelings up in a way that was ultimately unmanageable

Since Haneke himself has said the whodunit aspect is a red herring, I somehow doubt that there's one shot that "explains" it all.

Yes, this /\

If Ebert is referring to scene with Majid as a kid is bleeding from his mouth, I assume he means it's a key to understanding the backstory of Majid and Georges, and through that the larger issues of history and guilt that Caché is all about. So he probably just means it's a key to understanding the central themes of the movie, not a key to the mystery of who sent the videos. Which, like I said in my first post in this thread, is indeed irrelevant, as the videos have pretty much the same function as the videos in Lost Highway. Even if the final scene hints that Majid's and George's son know each other (which would make them the best candidates for shooting the videos), the scene also looks like the videos we've seen before, so it implies the video maker is someone else than those two. I don't think that, within the narrative, there is any real solution to the question of who did the videos, all that matters is what they do.

he feels his entire future was stolen at age five by one lie. georges' reappearance must have brought all those old feelings up in a way that was ultimately unmanageable

― Tracer Hand, Monday, January 18, 2010 11:19 AM (5 hours ago) Bookmark

ok.

have to go with it, i guess, though i still find the incident jarring. his parents were murdered by the french police. he was at georges' house for how long? his future still seems to have held out for him a family and (we guess) a more peaceful life than his parents had. (i can't remember what happens after he's taken away from georges' family.) he knows what it is to be orphaned, but does it anyway to his own son. in the end i don't find it easy to swallow.

vaguest use of SPOILER yet:

after reading some discussion of this here and there, i am enjoying the extra level of ambiguity added by people not having seen the film for a long time. since i haven't, and don't have the dvd, i am going to stick with ebert referring to this (detail from here); the shot at twenty thirty eight or whatever that shows that the kids knew each other way prior to the first meeting. assuming that this is the two kids from the end scene (hazy memory), it totally works as a smoking gun. i think it's a stretch to say that ebert's dramatic reveal is just a pointer to understanding the film thematically.

Though I guess what Ebert is aiming for could be this: we see a shot of Majid with blood in his mouth two times, and both times the movie cuts to that shot from a stationary shot, making a link between the stationary "video" image and the image of Majid. Now, it seems most likely that the image of Majid is something Georges recalls. When we first see it, the link between it and the stationary image is explained: Georges has received a video wrapped in a drawing which depicts a person with blood coming from his mouth. So it seems that the cut from the video to Majid represents Georges recalling this image from his past, after having seen the drawing. But the second time we see a cut from a stationary image to Majid is never explained. This happens around the 20 minute mark: first we see a stationary shot that resembles the videos we've seen before, but it appears to have been filmed inside Georges' house. Then the movie cuts to a shot of Majid spitting blood. Now, the stationary shot inside the house is never explained. We don't know if it's one of the videos or something else. So maybe Ebert is simply trying to point out that there is a clear link between the stationary shots and Georges' psyche, that the videos exist because Georges needs to see them.

(xx-post)

Schlump, I don't think it's Majid's son with Pierrot in that pic you posted.

have to go with it, i guess, though i still find the incident jarring. his parents were murdered by the french police. he was at georges' house for how long? his future still seems to have held out for him a family and (we guess) a more peaceful life than his parents had. (i can't remember what happens after he's taken away from georges' family.) he knows what it is to be orphaned, but does it anyway to his own son. in the end i don't find it easy to swallow.

no totally - he seems to have found some happiness in his life - but it's not as if suicides ever really make a lot of sense

and i think the point is that despite all of what he's accomplished - become a father, led a peaceful life, or whatever - the depth of that old hurt goes down a long, long way

Schlump, I don't think it's Majid's son with Pierrot in that pic you posted.

― Tuomas, Monday, January 18, 2010 5:16 PM (17 minutes ago) Bookmark

ha ha, this entirely demolishes my theory - i kinda thought majid's son was taller. correction appreciated.

This thread made me rewatch Caché, and it was pretty interesting to compare all the stationary shots: the ones that are explicitly shown to be videotapes, and the ones that aren't. I think all of them can be explained as reflecting different sorts of fear and guilt Georges is be feeling. We see videotapes of the exterior of George's house and Majid's flat, and of the house they both grew up in. This all illustrates the different paths Georges' and Majid's lices took: they started from the same place, but now Georges has a nice, clean bourgeoise house, whereas Majid lives in squalid apartment building. Then, as I explained above, there's a stationary shot inside Georges' house that's never explained. This might symbolize the memories and guilt the tapes have roused breaking through the polished exterior of Georges' bourgeois psyche. After this we see a videotape of Georges confronting Majid, a tape that has been sent both to Anne and to his boss. This, of course, plays upon Georges' fear of people finding out about his guilty secret, a secret which he has kept even from his wife.

Later on we have a stationary shot of a cafe table where Pierre, Anne's boss, appears to be flirting with her. This is an intriguing subplot that doesn't seem to go anywhere. The scene is shot too close to Anne and Pierre that it could have been a video made by someone, but later on Pierrot seems to know there's something going on between his mother and Pierre. (Btw, is it a coincidence that Pierre and Pierrot are named like that?) Did he see a video of them at the cafe, or has he simply deduced it from observing the two? Anyway, if we assume all the stationary shots relate to Georges' psyche, could the cafe shot reflect his suspicion of adultery between Anne and Pierre?

Just before the end of the movie, after Georges takes some sleeping pills and goes to bed, we have yet another stationary shot, where we see Majid as a kid being taken to the orphanage, and trying to resist it. This is implied to be a childhood memory of Georges, shot from his point of view. To me the fact that it's formally alike to the earlier videotapes strongly suggests that all of them (as well as the other stationary shots that may or may not be videos) are reflections of Georges's psyche. With this scene he finally seems to confront his guilt, reliving the childhood memories he'd repressed.

Finally, the movie ends with one more stationary shot that might be yet another videotape, but we never find out. In it we see Majid's son meeting Pierrot in front of his school. They talk about something, and to me it looks like Majid's son is laughing, but it's hard to tell. This is a very ambiguous scene, and obviously Haneke intended it to be like that. Does it reflect on Georges' fears, that his son and Majid's son planned the whole thing, that Pierrot has betrayed him? Or is it supposed to be an optimistic scene, proving to Georges/the viewer that the two sons might find the sort of connection and understanding their fathers never had, that they can overcome the fear and the guilt?

One more thing about the scene where young Majid has blood in his mouth: later in the movie Georges confesses to Anne that he didn't like Majid and told lies about him. One of the lies was that Majid was coughing blood, but when Georges' parents took him to a doctor, nothing was found. But we do actually see Majid coughing blood. The fact that this scene is shown, and not merely told by Georges, kinda makes it feel like a proper memory and not just a lie he told. I'm not sure what to make of it... Is it supposed to be a false memory, something Georges came up with to justify his behaviour towards Majid, and to ease the guilt? Or did he really see Majid cough blood? If it's the latter, what does that mean?

yeah what is odd is if those are flashbacks and accurate to what happened, georges didn't make that up. idk, if there is something to my theory that georges did this himself, it's that he feels guilty about what happened, but wants to blame majid for making him feel guilty ("terrorizing" him, in fact). georges keeps telling majid and his son that he is not responsible for what happened when they were kids. but neither of them said he was responsible.

It's worth noting that the actual thing that got Majid sent to the orphanage was not the blood-coughing story, but Georges lying to Majid that his parents wanted him to kill the cock. And nothing in the movie suggests Georges wasn't guilty of that.

Also, I think Majid's son pretty much claims Georges was responsible, when he confronts Georges in the toilet and says Georges' lie robbed Majid of a good education. But it's true that Majid himself looks more resigned and not as obviously angry at Georges as his son. He merely seems to feel sad that Georges wouldn't apologize him, or at least acknowledge what had happened, that Georges didn't even recognize him at first. I think that's a pretty important thing, because at second viewing I felt that the movie is not just about guilt, but about a failure to admit that guilt. It's not that Georges is a bad man, that what he did a six-year old is inexcusable, but his failure to apologize for, or even acknowledge what had happened that makes everything go wrong. He lies to his wife about having met Majid, he doesn't tell her the real reason Majid got sent away, he doesn't tell his boss why Majid might be mad at him. I felt that if he'd come clean to his wife right from the start, if he'd apologized Majid when he first met him, the tapes would have stopped coming and Majid might have not killed himself. It's quite significant that the movie ends with Georges finally confessing to Anne what he did to Majid as a kid, and him dreaming about the day Majid was dragged away. It feels that in these scenes Georges finally acknowledges the guilt he'd previously tried to deny. I think what Haneke is trying to say is that you shouldn't dwell on guilt, or be excessively punished for it, but to acknowledge what has happened and sincerely apologize for it, and try to build on that. Which I guess is what happens in the final scene, if you interpret the meeting between Pierrot and Majid's son in a positive light.

I have to say I enjoyed Caché more on the second viewing than on the first. Like I wrote in this thread in 2006, on the first viewing I intepreted the movie mostly as a political allegory, and saw pretty much everything in as a metaphor relating to the history of colonialism. But now it felt more like a personal drama that is deeply embedded in examination of colonialism and racism, but deals with the subject by showing what sort of psychological effects they may have caused for people on both side of the line. I think Caché works better on this level, as a political "message movie" it's still a bit too didactic and too clever for its own good.

all of this discussion mostly reinforces my sense that this movie is good at making people think it's got more going on than it actually does. (which is a good trick, since what's actually going on is pretty dubious in all sorts of ways, both narrative and allegorical.)

ha, and i just realized i said the exact same thing in the 2nd post in this thread, four years ago. at least i'm consistent...

i don't understand this! if it provokes people to see that it has all these things going on, why is it the case that your perception is the correct one?

because i'm right! no, it's just that nothing anyone has said (including ebert, at least until he spells out whatever skeleton key he's found) makes me think haneke is up to anything but vague obfuscation for its own sake. the basic story and moral are simple enough (and simple-minded enough, and problematic in ways haneke doesn't seem aware of), but they're gussied up with a tricksy "mystery" that gives the illusion of some hidden (or i guess i should say caché) meaning. i don't think haneke's a particularly deep guy, i guess, so i don't trust that he's embedded anything of enlightening significance.

I don't think the "mystery" thing is really that relevant at all. Most of the blog posts linked here seem to think Ebert's "smoking gun" reveals who made the videotapes, but Ebert himself didn't say that it's the whodunit part to which whatever he noticed relates. Anyway, regardless of what Ebert thinks, on second viewing I think the movie does succeed in being a psychologically intriguing and multi-faceted reflection on guilt (and specifically postcolonial guilt), even if the strictly political elements are kinda simple-minded. And this psychological aspect of Caché still works very well whether or not you can solve whatever mystery there is to be solved.

this is hard to explain, but i think it takes away from the film to see it as a "mystery" where the important thing is to connect the dots and figure out who did it. i agree with tuomas..

seems like only a matter of preference whether you want to see the film as a basic story + moral which is obfuscated by other elements, or a story in which there are so many elements at work, and so many things we don't know, that no basic story holds up. georges and his family all seem to be unreliable.

i still think it's fascinating politically because of the perspective we have & the implications of that. we're inclined to believe georges because it's told from his POV, and until i watched it a second time it didn't occur to me to question this, but why should we believe he's being "terrorized" at all?

-- what's actually going on is pretty dubious in all sorts of ways, both narrative and allegorical

-- the basic story and moral are simple enough (and simple-minded enough, and problematic in ways haneke doesn't seem aware of)

nor us, unless you say what you mean

i am actually quite interested in what you mean - mainly because i'm interested in how haneke creates his effects (of mystery; of "the bogus appearance of depth" which is what it seems you're calling him out for; of ambiguity)

http://blogs.suntimes.com/ebert/2010/01/a_riddle_wrapped_in_a_mystery.html

Ebert comments on the discussion that followed his Great Movies article, but he doesn't really say why he thought the scene with Majid coughing blood was the "smoking gun". What's more interesting, though, is that according to Ebert Scorsese is gonna direct an American remake of the movie with Leonardo DiCaprio in the lead role. Sounds kinda pointless to me.

oh god i hope not. it was going to be ron howard.

wonder if the kid will be vietnamese, mexican, or what.

The idea an American remake raises some interesting questions though... How are they gonna handle Georges' guilt, if he's an American? Who will play the role of Majid? Will the remake reduce the drama to a personal conflict, or will it try to address American racism/colonialism in the same way Caché deals with French history.

Haha, x-post.

I guess the easiest choice would be to make Majid an African-American, but that seems a bit too obvious.

nor us, unless you say what you mean

good point. what i mean is, i think haneke's whole conception of the relationship between majid and georges' family is problematic. the defining trauma in majid's life -- one that we're meant to take as a contributing factor in his suicide -- is not the loss of his parents in a race riot but the subsequent expulsion from georges' (white european) family. granted, 6-yr-olds can process and interpret things in all sorts of ways, and you could make some argument about how majid as he grew up conflated the two things projected his anger at losing his parents on georges and his family. but that's a stretch, and like most things that go into making this movie seem important, it requires the viewer to do the intellectual work that haneke didn't do. to me, it just seems like a fundamental flaw that points up haneke's inability to actually empathize with majid; he's using him as a plot device to indict georges and his bourgeois life and culture, so it's important for georges to be the author of majid's tragedy. never mind that it sort of basically infantilizes and condescends to majid as a character, and that it sets up an allegory in which the fundamental problem of western/nonwestern relations is not subjugation and paternalism but the failure to make good on that paternalism (the crime isn't in the adoption, it's in the explusion).

i don't think haneke really intends that message or is even thinking about majid enough to contemplate it. he's mostly eager to prosecute georges and his whole liberal-intellectual milieu, by exposing its hypocrisies and the degree to which it rests on unacknowledged crimes. (and as usual with haneke's moralizing, i get the sense that he is somewhat excluding himself from his scolding; he's not implicated, he's the avenging conscience.) and exposing liberal-intellectual hypocrisy is fine, but i just think the game is rigged in this movie. it would have been a lot more interesting for majid to be a different kind of character, not such a lumpen victim. but here he's just the scapegoat necessary for haneke's machinations.

I pretty much agree with you, and this is why I think the movie works better as a psychological examination of bourgeios guilt than as a postcolonial political analysis. In my opinion everything in the movie, even the scenes where he's not physically present, is told from Georges' point of view. Majid isn't given a independent role that might help to explain his personal motives, he merely functions as an instigator of Georges' self-analysis. I guess you could argue that this is a deliberate choice on Haneke's part, that Majid's role in the movie is limited because the few things we learn about him are all that matter to Georges, he has no need for Majid as a whole person. If, I like I argued, the movie is told completely from Georges' point of view, it doesn't give Majid an independent existence because Georges never does. But this means that movie's capability of any nuanced political analysis is by definition limited, it can only function to implicate Georges' bourgeois conscience. To me it felt with the last few scenes Haneke tries to get past this impasse, by showing Majid's son as someone who refuses victimhood and paternalism of Georges' part, and by implying a connection between him and Pierrot. But again the movie's limited view makes it impossible to draw any real conclusions on them: what motivates Pierrot and Majid's son, how they feel about the situation, is left mostly unexplained. Georges can't quite understand them, so the movie doesn't try to either.

that's a good point tipsy, when you say:

it sets up an allegory in which the fundamental problem of western/nonwestern relations is not subjugation and paternalism but the failure to make good on that paternalism (the crime isn't in the adoption, it's in the explusion).

and i too wanted more of majid, more of an actual character, i.e. myself upthread:

the videotape of the reverse angle of majid's apartment, for instance, is at first presented as "another angle" on the argument that had taken place in his apartment. i really am gullible and get caught up in the movies, like i mentioned, so maybe some of haneke's techniques worked on me better than they did on others, but i initially read that angle as majid's sid eof the story. "wow," i thought. we were finally going to see the other side! we had broken out of georges' viewpoint! but no - the scene we were watching was being watched and manipulated by georges and binoche on the home video player.

just saw this. really enjoyed it. not bothered at all by the lack of a clear wrap-up, and agree with tracer hand pretty much 100% in everything he says.

Re: Ebert's smoking gun (or not)

Now I call your attention to the shot I missed the first time through. You will find it on the DVD, centering around 20:39.

on the dvd i'm watching, 20:39 is the dinner scene, and though i may be over-reaching here a little the subtitles say "sitting at the far end, near the mirror, you know" which is just the snippet leading into the story about the dog. scene immediately before just shows georges & pierrot walking to the car and georges picking a leaflet from the wiper blade as if he were expecting it to be another drawing (as we all are).

brought the following from the narrative:

totally convinced of majid's innocence. also totally bought that georges re-appearing so suddenly and so callously into his life could easily have been a motivation for his actions. felt, at the beginning of that scene, that majid might have found out more about the tapes and this was also driving his actions. bénichou was magical.

have a sneaking suspicion that mujid's son is francois- the kid that pierrot stays overnight with before coming back so suspicious of his mother. their meeting at the end didn't seem like a 'first' meeting to me.

spent the whole movie convinced that the swimming coach was involved, as he's the only person (apart from georges' dreams) from whose perspective we see something. could well be wrong about this as i spent much of the rest of the film waiting for this to pan out, feleign very pleased with myself.

personally, felt wife was having/had had an affair, felt that pierrot and mujid's son could well have been responsible (insofar as the piece makes you feel like any one person is responsible)

all based on first viewing- was enthralled and will watch again.

Man I need to see this again.

2nd that - I keep meaning to buy the blu-ray to do the beautiful photography justice (although recall being v. impressed at the transfer on SD dvd too).

thread title makes me think CAKE which is a pronunciation i have noticed before
the film itself is good iirc but i can't be too interested in haneke's plodding ontologies and the heaviness of his framing (image and narrative)
'accept the mystery'

Now I call your attention to the shot I missed the first time through. You will find it on the DVD, centering around 20:39.

on the dvd i'm watching, 20:39 is the dinner scene, and though i may be over-reaching here a little the subtitles say "sitting at the far end, near the mirror, you know" which is just the snippet leading into the story about the dog.

Apparently different region DVDs have a different scene at 20:39. Ebert has confirmed the scene he meant was the one where Georges dreams of Majid with blood in his mouth, plus what takes place immediately before and after it. It's unclear, though, why Ebert thinks this is the "smoking gun". The only reason I can think of is this: just before the dream of Majid we see a shot of the street from Georges' and Anne's bedroom window. This shot is stationary and it looks like one of the videotapes. At the end of the shot, just before the dream starts, we can hear someone breathing (you have to listen carefully to hear it). It sounds like the breath of a man, not a boy or a woman. This scene would suggest that whoever shot the videos is an adult man and has access to Georges' and Anne's bedroom. I think it could only be Georges. (Also, after Majid's suicide, there is another scene where someone looks at the same street from the same window - and this time it's shown to be Georges.) This is further confirmed when the bedroom scene cuts directly to the scene with Majid's bloody mouth. The transition between the scenes is not immediately apparent, only during the second viewing I realized that Majid isn't in the bedroom of the previous shot, the dream actually takes place in Georges' parents' living room. You can see this living room room when Georges visits his mother. Anyway, maybe what Ebert was after is that the juxtaposition between the stationary "video" shot in the bedroom and the dream makes it feel like they both represent the same point of view, i.e. Georges'. Maybe it's as simple as this: Georges looks out of the bedroom window (via the "video gaze"), then goes to sleep and dreams of Majid. I think all this would mean Georges is the one behind the videos, if not literally then at least in a metaphysical sense.

young majid's bloody mouth scene definitely takes place in georges childhood home- the chair and bookcase are shown in the dream and later in the scene were georges looks in on the room briefly while staying with his mother.

i took the dream sequences as just that, tbh- just a seque of images from what was georges past/consciousness to reveal more of the backstory as the film develops.

Yeah, there's nothing special about the dream secquence as such, but I think there's something interesting about the scene that precedes it (the stationary bedroom shot), and in the connection between the two. Considering how tight the mise-en-scene in Caché is, I don't think it's a mistake that the bedroom window shot is the only videotape (or a videotape-like scene) where we can hear the person behind the camera, even if all we hear is just a small breath.

having a hard time convincing SO that this is worth re-watching, btw- she was pretty frustrated at the lack of resolution. I was happy enough myself to accept a 'whodunnit' where the audience aren't magically omniscient for a change.

Yes, I think if your searching for a clear resolution you've kind just heading straight to disappointment, and, in my opinion, kind of missing the point, getting kind of bogged down with red herrings and all.

otm.
What puzzles me with this film is that there seems to be so many clues to something which ultimately is probably not there. When one is used to thinking that each scene ina movie has a justification for the overall plot, some parts seemed designed to mislead (eg. teh way Francois' mom seems a bit freaked out when returning Pierrot to his mom, the whole sequence of Georges taking the pills and going to bed, etc)

Thinking this is the new Chinatown, with the sense that reality is unfathomable and the things you need to know are somewhere outside the frame

wau

It's the 14th arrondissement Jake

Er, Jacques

I finally got around to acquiring a slew of his films. I am tempted to watch Funny Games too, even though there's s'posed to be a rather brutal rape scene in it. But somehow I have managed to not see one Haneke film even though my best friend kept saying I should watch The Pianist. So I will now correct this mistake.

Oh yes, I do wonder why The White Ribbon gets such a bad rap on Allmovie.com.

I remember no brutal rape scene in Funny Games, but it's been something like 12 years since I saw it. It is quite disturbing, but IIRC most of the violence happens off-camera.

Unless you got the American Funny Games, maybe Haneke made some changes to it? Haven't seen that one.

I will probably watch it regardless of my husband's warning. I have always been fascinated by violence. Will see it alone, as my husband detests (domestic) violence. I don't know, I also dislike it, but I still am fascinated by it somehow. On screen, not in real life of course.

And no, not seen the American version (either).

I think Haneke is very much against violence. The whole point of Funny Games is to break the conventions of cinema violence in order to criticize the way violence generally works in movies and how people appreciate it. It's a hard film to watch, but I'd assume someone who detests violence would appreciate what Haneke is doing there. I certainly did, and I'm as anti-violence as you can get.

well i'm a big fan of violence and i loved it too!

I'd assume someone who detests violence would appreciate what Haneke is doing there.

Close. It targets, specifically, people who appreciate movie violence.

The movie is self-satisfied and arrogant. Also sorta crap.

haha xp also 'Haneke is very much against violence' wow

Do you mean he is very much in favor of violence? I haven't seen any of his movies, but I 'm assuming Tuomas means that he is against it but uses it as a means to express his dislike? Does that make sense? Anyway, I should watch it.

i think he means it's a bit of a vacuous statement?

I'd be interested to know what you think of The Piano Teacher, Nath. It's my favourite of Haneke's films, largely due to Huppert's astonishing performance, but also because it maintains such blazing intensity throughout. I also really like Time of the Wolf, probably because am a total sucker for post-apocalyptic misery on film.

(yes xp)

tuomas seems to have fallen for haneke press releases hook, line and sinker

Yeah. Time of the Wolf is, so far, the only Haneke movie I've seen that I really liked.

Haneke is very much in favor of violence in his movies, and making you feel bad for watching them. No self-examination whatsoever, and Funny Games and Benny's Video (as Caché) were re-made to remove any autobigraphical elements. Screw him.

Bit irrelevant, but Caché respects very much a modern version of Sheridan le Fanu's The Watcher. (from A Glass Darkly).

Ugh, finger slipped and posted - you get the idea tho.

Bill, I will post about it. :-)

Hi there,
I just wanted to drop in something that seems to have gone unmentioned in the discussion about Caché.
I think in watching this film it's important to consider your own implication in the film as a viewer.
I believe the narrative, the mystery and the thematics also include the passivity or even guilt of viewers of events.
One is implicated in the horror by being a willing viewer of it, in fact, as film watchers we in essence will these horrible events into existence.
I suggest re-watching the film, paying attention to formal elements and consider the film to be something bigger than what plays out within it's own world.
You, as the viewer are part of the film. You instigate the mystery. The events unfold only because you are there. You want the mystery. You want the resolution. You want this film to be, even if you don't realise you do. Viewers infact create cassettes, DVD's, news reports, web feeds, internet sites, everything. Without an audience, these do not exist.
What do you think?

what if reality is just an illusion

what if this film
in actuality really is
completely made up

Brt, your theory, as you formulate it, would apply to every film ever made. So why would Caché be a special case within this theory? It's true that in Funny Games Haneke plays upon what the audience expects/wants to happen next, and refuses to give them that, but there's no such "gotcha!" moments aimed at the viewer in Caché. The fact that there's no obvious solution to the mystery of the tapes is not supposed to implicate the viewer, the answer to the mystery would implicate certain people within the movie. Basically, the source of the tapes is also the source of Georges' guilt, and the reason Haneke doesn't give any definite answer to the question of who/what was behind the tapes is that he wants to say something about this sort of guilt. (Though like I've mentioned upthread, it's not that difficult to get an answer if you put the film to a formal analysis.)

well, you could say that the audience's experience of the film parallels georges' experience of the tapes. each watches something presented as a mystery, holding certain ideas about what mysteries imply - most obviously that mysteries imply solution. it can't be mere coincidence that the mystery presented to georges is a film, or that cache's camera plays the live-or-memorex tricks we saw in funny games. georges is unhinged by the absence of an explanation, and it's reasonable to suppose that haneke intends to play a similar prank on his audience, punishing us for the simplicity of our expectations.

looking back, this appears to be exactly what brt said yesterday. so condense to "brt otm."

dismissive wank gesture

oh simple-minded audience, wanting an explanation to a simple conundrum

yes, because haneke is a weiner

p much

I thought the unsolvedness worked OK just because it fits in with the general mood of the film. The only 'point' I got from the film if you want to call it that was that it's arbitrary where you start and finish a narrative, unseen events are implicated in the portion of time you see which aren't (or can't be) explained within the scope of the narrative.

In other words I think the technique of confusing the viewer as to where their sympathies are meant to lie is effective at creating a mood of unease, but there's nothing that revelatory to thinking 'oh wait maybe I am implicated in all kinds of awful stuff that doesn't even fit into the narrative of my life'.

he only 'point' I got from the film ... was that it's arbitrary where you start and finish a narrative, unseen events are implicated in the portion of time you see which aren't (or can't be) explained within the scope of the narrative.

...but there's nothing that revelatory to thinking 'oh wait maybe I am implicated in all kinds of awful stuff that doesn't even fit into the narrative of my life'.

― Vasco da Gama

i agree, but remember that georges is personally implicated by the mystery he investigates. the unseen events in question likely are related to the narrative of his life, but seem to arise from suppressed parts of that narrative. this creates a subtextual political argument within haneke's film concerning the massacres of algerians in french cities in the early 60s, and on that level, it implicates its presumably french audience in the mystery with which they've been presented. the withholding of a solution to both mysteries (the one georges is shown trying to solve and the one the audience approaches in watching the film), haneke makes a point about the ways in which such narratives seek to localize and simplify questions of responsibility, and thereby to provide a cheap sort of comfort. while we never really learn who sent the videotapes or what they might mean, it's notable that they are, in a sense, memories - echoes of george's suppressed guilt. likewise, cache itself can be seen as a sort of memory, one that seeks to goad its audience into an awareness of culpability. i therefore see the film as scolding and morally arrogant, and these qualities often bother me in haneke's films. here, though, i was sufficiently intrigued and entertained to tolerate his typical bitterness.

i now notice in looking back that the argument i'm fumbling towards is hashed out much more thoughtfully upthread.

"the unseen events in question likely are related to the narrative of his life"

yeah that's true, but he thought the childhood episode was only a minor aspect of his own life story and would remain so. When the unseen network of consequences attached to it begin to impinge on his life, the coherence of his life-story is threatened. He is challenged to try and vindicate himself by figuring out the whole network, but I think the film hints that this is an impossible task, he has to draw the line somewhere and retreat into complacency. Any attempt to uncover things eventually results in a new covering-over. So I don't think the film is trying to make anyone in particular feel culpable. I thought it was saying that everyone's moral self-esteem is necessarily based on a propensity to trivialise aspects of their history which are messy and potentially disruptive.

It's no so much actual guilt we are suppressing as moral ambiguity, which we all have to keep at bay to avoid going crazy.

tempted to teach this film since it's such a perfect example of art cinema but i hate it.

i would love to teach it, and lead students through some of the various "meanings" that can be attributed to it and so forth, do some real close reading of it ... and then, say, "ok, but what if we assume haneke is full of shit?"

yeah, i mean the whole thing is like a closed system designed to fuck with you, which is really only one way (and a particularly bullying one) to utilize the open-endedness/structural-ambiguity schema common to art films. a very ungenerous and self-regarding form of open-endedness.

the most objectionable part is all the self-serving "interesting"/"political" concepts and memes that haneke feels we should yoke the film's game of form to. which would go over students' heads anyway. (algeria? where's that?)

id guess in france the kids would "get" that to be fair

and in general ppl in the west/north seem kinda complacently guilty...

i don't mind if haneke wants to make his films about colonialism, but the attempt to make [danny auteuil's character]'s guilt -- guilt for what he did as an infant -- stand for europe's guilt is bs through and through

yeah it's ridiculous. not worth dwelling on politics of his films, they're thoroughly trite.

finally saw this yesterday after meaning to for eight years. my first haneke!

it was compelling and tense at the time but the more i think about it the less impressive it gets imo. thematically, i mean - i don't know much about cinematography etc but the way it was crafted was awesome, that opening scene! and the whodunnit aspect makes it quite fun to analyse and mull over afterwards. BUT the lack of resolution, or the way it's entirely set up to be a whodunnit while also making it pretty obvious that answering that question isn't the point, makes it seem a bit empty. as has been pointed out the political allegory is laughable - in fact the moment when georges reveals what he did when he was 6 is so anticlimactic, and certainly not enough to bear the weight of the rest of the film (unless he's lying even then?). in the situation he describes, it's fairly obvious to me that georges' parents must take the bulk of the blame - for considering majid so disposable that they can offer to adopt him and then send him away on what amounts to little more than a whim.

tracer otm about how frustrating the exchanges between georges and majid are - when majid denies knowledge of the tapes why doesn't georges describe what's been happening instead of blustering ahead? sure, georges is a blustery character, but it doesn't ring true at all.

majid and his son are complete ciphers - i found myself asking why majid was so passive, why he even felt he needed to take his drastic action, why his son is so oblique - we're given no insight into their lives or characters. what did majid want out of life that georges' family denied him? did he want to be a tv intellectual? living in a run-down apartment isn't really an answer here but we know NOTHING else about him.

re: the last scene, i initially assumed targeting pierrot was another revenge strategy on the part of majid's son. i don't really buy that they were in it together for some reason. the most intuitive explanation, especially given the similarity between the static tapes and georges' dreams, is that they're products of georges' repressed guilt somehow made real. yes, i find this silly too.

pierrot accusing his mother of adultery was a plot point that rather dissipated into nothing.

i find myself wondering about the role of georges' mother - not only does majid somehow know she's been ill, but she's the ONLY character whose dialogue is direct, knowledgeable and able to cut through bullshit.

ultimately i guess i don't find "bourgeois liberals have white guilt" a particularly revelatory point?

Not seen this the whole way through for a while now, but I'm going to assume that THAT scene is still a massive shocker.

Lex, watch the Piano Teacher next, BEST FILM EVER.

oh yeah a laff riot

it's a shocker and we don't see it coming because THAT CHARACTER IS GIVEN NO DEPTH WHATSOEVER!

wow - I saw this only 2 years ago but already forgot what you guys are referring to by THAT scene

it's a shocker and we don't see it coming because THAT CHARACTER IS GIVEN NO DEPTH WHATSOEVER!

This ... is actually sort of OTM.

Well, obviously George's parents are mainly to blame, the whole point - as I see it - of the film is that the racist policies of that generation is what has created the differing paths in the life of Majid and George. George is only to blame because he allowed and exploited this, the hope is for the next generation to come together and stop it. Yeah, it's pretty 'white guilt', but I knew nothing of the 61 massacre, and as such I found the story sorta revelatory. But it's a bit overrated as a film (as is White Ribbon, btw), I much prefer something like Code Inconnu.

the coyness of haneke in leaving it so open here is that so much is open to interpretation.

for instance, i found majid's distress at georges' accusations palpable, and i thought it obvious that we were meant to glean that his living in the poor conditions he did were as a result of a childhood in which the unthinking duplicity of his now-accuser has played a large part.

i personally felt that his 'passive' reaction in taking out this protest in an act of such violence against himself, ensuring that georges witness it, was a much more powerful and profound statement in contect than an action taken against georges or his family.

again in context of this picture as i saw it unfolding, georges blustering ahead over mujid's denials is a signal (repeated many times throughout the film) of georges' own self-denial that he has a case to answer here, or that mujid can be granted any access even now to steer or influence events because of fear of the revenge that he may exact (from georges POV).

imo, this is the movie. it's about georges and his projections. mujid may be a cipher to us, he's little more than a cipher to georges, a nightmare projection of overwhelming past guilt long suppressed. all the other elements that you found unsatisfying were, in my interpretation, nothing more than grace notes at best, false trails at worst (up to and including the algeria/1961 allegories, which are surely too clumsy from a director as meticulous as haneke to be anything but).

there is no consistent nor unquestionable POV except for (or perhaps not even) the implacable cameras under whose eye the principals are placed throughout, and seeking a complete story that can be solved to satisfaction from any such POV will inevitably, i think, lead to your finding flaws in characterisation, plot, etc, which again is obv a matter of taste and what you brought from watching it yourself when Haneke leaves so much unresolved.

compelling and tense at the time but the more i think about it the less impressive it gets imo

welcome to his world.

the interactions between georges and majid made sense if you look at them from the perspective of "everything is georges' projections and represents what's happening inside his head" but they were frustrating and pretty unconvincing as actual dialogue happening in the actual real world

and if most of the rest of the film is meant to be a cipher in comparison to georges, from the tapes to majid...georges is not actually interesting enough a character to do that much heavy lifting

as i said i did find it an engrossing film - the acting was superb, i thought, especially juliette binoche, and the cinematography was brilliant in how it managed to hint things and lead you on - i just wish all that technique had been put to more substantial use

Amour is his best – one of the only times his masochism settles on an appropriate subject.

Amour is a steaming pile of vileness

yeah i don't disagree with any of that either lexon another day i could have disliked it thoroughly for pretty much those reasons too.

Amour is a steaming pile of vileness

― eclectic husbandry (Dr Morbius), Monday,

an opinion you've never quite clarified or elaborated, knowing your taste

It's an exploitation film with varicose veins... plus a dumb pigeon dream, grrrrrr. Haneke hasn't been able to shake off the "Yes, dear spectator, I vill make you talk" vibe in years, and Cache was maybe the last time it was remotely entertaining.

he got lucky with the actors, specifically Tringtignant

Was just watching Straub/Huillet's Too Early, too Late. Mention it here as Haneke almost certainly steals a couple of scenes cold? 1) The shot from the car as Majid is taken away from his French adopters (been years so hazy on the plot detail) matches the first in this film: shot from the side of the car as it goes on the roundabout for 5+ mins. Then 2) the final shot in the school is basically the same idea as the shot taken outside what seems to be a public building in Cairo.

When I say steal it sounds graver than it is. Almost all of the static/slow cinema is drawn in some way from certain (mostly US) experimental films and the Straubs then travels via Akerman then to SE Asia in the 80s, but I love how both Hidden and Too Early, too Late shift from Paris to North Africa, to intermixing of histories of class and colonialism. Its there in spirit as well as in the way its shot, except Haneke also takes a bit of Peckinpah.

re: slow cinema...And much more of course.