unrightable wrongs

Caché (Hidden) – Michael Haneke (contains spoilers – plot elements revealed)

Few recent films reward a second viewing more than Haneke’s justly praised Caché (Hidden). I caught it again at one of the Curzon (Mayfair and Soho) excellent midday Sunday bills. Its current release on video makes it even more widely available. Highly recommended, though it may be dangerous to be able to rewind etc. The temptation by this means to unravel what looks like a complex mystery plot would be great. But to do so I think would be, following an observation Haneke himself has made, to miss the point. Yet this absorbing, enigmatic film makes such advice hard to accept.

To understand Haneke’s remark was an additional reason to enjoy again this clever, beautifully acted, multi-layered film. On one level the action is clear: George and Anne Laurent are highly successful, bourgeois intellectuals, she in publishing, Georges presenting a book programme on TV. They begin to receive anonymous video tapes of their own house as if under surveillance. The tapes are accompanied by increasingly disturbing child-like pictures, first of a child with blood pouring out of its mouth, then from the neck and finally of a decapitated chicken. Increasingly disturbing the safe, affluent middle-class lifestyle of the Laurents and their teenage son Pierrot, the third tape shows Georges’ family home.

Though banal in content, the unsettling mystery of the tapes begins to ruffle the surface calm of Anne and Georges’ ordered life and settled relationship. In a superbly acted scene this erupts in a crisis of trust when Georges tells Anne that he may know who is sending the tapes but refuses to tell her who. On this level the Austrian Haneke explores a characteristically French theme – the vulnerability and unease of the bourgoisie faced with breaches of their civilised lifestyle by naked reality in the form of powerful emotion, especially anger and aggression. The Laurents and their friends express a patrician disdain for the police who say they cannot do anything until a defined threat or crime has taken place. A brief confrontation between a frustrated Georges and a young black cyclist coming out of the police station leading to Anne saving him from a fight, reinforces this theme.

Guilt at past wrongs, and the consequences of them, known or unknown, sets up another thematic thread. Haneke neatly blends the personal and political as Georges reluctantly explains his suspicions. Prompted by the tape of his childhood home he recalls that his parents helped an Algerian family in the late 50’s and 60’s. Georges resented the attention given Majid, the young son of the family. Majid’s parents were both killed at the infamous ‘Nuite noire’ in Paris on October 17 1961 when French police brutally suppressed riots by the pro-Algerian FLN, resulting in over 200 deaths. When the elder Laurents decided to adopt Majid, 6 year-old Georges’ resentment grew. He first told his parents he had seen Majid coughing up blood – a worry because of widespread tuberculosis in the Algerian community. But Majid was proved healthy. Georges then said his father wanted Majid to kill a troublesome chicken by chopping off its head. In a shocking flash-back cut we see the chicken incident recalled by Georges in a nightmare which ends with Majid approaching the terrified young Georges with the axe that beheaded the chicken. The 6 year-old’s lies were sufficient for his parents to abandon their plans for adoption and Majid was handed over to the authorities for care.

A fourth tape locates a flat in an immigrant quarter of Paris, and enables Georges to confirm his fears and meet up with a world-weary, ageing Majid whose life since they last met appears to have been irreparably damaged and dominated by the lies and injustice that blighted it. Majid denies all knowledge of the tapes but Georges refuses to believe him and threatens him if they do not stop. The subsequent fifth tape shows that this confrontation was itself secretly filmed.

When Anne and Georges’ son Pierrot goes missing, the desperate Laurents have Majid and his son arrested. They are released when Pierrot turns up having spent the night with a schoolfriend intentionally not telling his parents. This cry for help reflects his belief that Anne is having an affair with Pierre, both her boss and with his wife, friends of the Laurents. A copy of Georges’ confrontation with Majid is sent to his boss, so when he is called by Majid to come over he immediately goes on what proves to be a personal invitation to Majid’s suicide. Twice in this film Haneke bursts a moment of horror upon us without warning. And both are so effective that gasps can be heard in the cinema. But this is real horror with genuine dramatic purpose.

The safe, settled, bourgeois lifestyle of the Laurents’ is now devastatingly thrown into a chaos of guilt, lost trust, and uncertainty. Anne sees the man she has married as if for the first time. And Georges’ wrestles with the insoluble moral dilemma that his wrongful actions as a six-year-old, have travelled through time to occasion the bloody death of a disillusioned adult, who he irreparably harmed. Challenged at work by Majid’s son, to acknowledge his responsibility for Majid’s death, Georges retreats literally into the oblivion of a naked, dark, tablet induced sleep. The film ends with a reprise of an earlier long shot of the exit to Pierrot’s school. We see Pierrot walk down the steps to meet and engage in a friendly conversation with Majid’s son. Majid’s son leaves and Pierrot returns to his friends. We are left with the mystery of the tapes. Who? How? Why?

The very French theme of the insulation of the affluent middle class from the visceral realities faced elsewhere, not least in immigrant communities is clear enough. As is the passing ironic observation that even infidelity is civilised amongst the bourgeoisie. Also, his parents having died as the result of the actions of the French authorities, Majid’s treatment, based upon lies and deception and creating a genuine injustice that echoes unresolved down the years, must resonate with political significance in the context of French colonial politics. Especially Algeria.

But perhaps Haneke’s cinematic preoccupations and aesthetic throw most light on his remark about the enigmatic ‘inconclusive’ plot line. First he delights in weaving three levels of visual reality together, constantly either reminding us, like Godard, that we are watching a film, or making us uncertain which is which. Thus there is the ‘reality’ of us watching the film, bringing our own ideas and thoughts to what we see; the ‘real’ action of events in the film as they happen; and then the initially undetectable recording of earlier ‘real’ events in the action that we discover we are watching with the characters themselves.

But for me, Haneke’s most fascinating exploration is of the idea of narrative, story. There is a telling scene at dinner where a friend recounts an increasingly fascinating story about himself that draws us and his listeners in only to vanish in a flash when he reveals it as a mere joke. We want to believe in stories. We see events in the world, especially our own lives, as a coherent narrative. We are drawn to finding within the events of the world, notably our own lives, a sense and meaning that is derived from them being linked as a narrative. The story, my story, our story. Yet for each of us, ours is a ‘story’ with no ending. (“Death is not an event in life” – Wittgenstein). Even journalists reporting the news are sent out to find ‘the story’. Most of mainstream cinema is driven by narrative. Over the years movie-makers have almost like jazz musicians, played with the underlying narrative structure of films: flash-backs and time-fractured narratives being the most common. We have grown used to ‘reading’ these devices and enjoying the enhanced dramatic opportunities they offer.

But if our lives and the events in them have a sense, a meaning, it is one that we have given them not one they intrinsically possess. They are after all, merely a set of facts. I can only change the physical events in the world by physical intervention and only then within heavily circumscribed limits. But I have more freedom to change sense, meaning, in the world by imagination, by thought. Perhaps Haneke’s tapes tempt us to impose a sense of narrative structure on the events in the film that they do not really possess. Like the chicken wire around which we create a plaster sculpture of any shape we wish. It holds things together until they stand on their own when the chicken wire is hidden and no longer relevant. Its vital purpose served. The drama, tragedy, moral dilemmas, issues of emotion, trust and guilt, that arise in Caché are what is important. The tapes perhaps suggest that the journey the film shows had a definite starting point and will reach a definite destination. A denouement. Yet every film, if you think about it, simply shows a part of any character’s journey. Their ‘life’ before and after the period of the film is so to speak ‘out-of-frame’. So one way for me, of understanding Haneke’s remark is to see the tapes as a satisfying, narrative hook, to engage us and draw us in and make us care about his characters and their reactions when an unexplained sense of threat jolts them out of their comfortable bourgeois certainties.

How you feel about this is I guess a matter of taste. Maybe one feels a little cheated. But for me the symmetry of the film itself and the thought-provoking issues within it are far more satisfying than just another clichéd ‘unexpected’ twist ending.
(November 2005)

Filed under: 5 stars, Drama, Europe/World cinema, General, Michael Haneke, Philosophical, Political