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[feverpitch]

For those who are into serious cinema, the following article is an appreciation of the latest offering from the great Austrian filmmaker Michael Haneke. My favourite filmmaker over the last few years. Difficult, unnerving, sometimes shocking and always controversial, this former professor of Phliosophy at Univ of Vienna has a few abiding topics -- the individual in society, 'emotional glaciation', the modern 'surveillance' society and, voyeurism -- all viewed through the philosophical lens of Ludwig Von Wittgenstein, Friedrich Nietzsche, Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan. Let the name dropping not deter you. Do go and check out 'Funny Games', his last Austrian film, and then, if you can stomach its sometimes eerie, sometimes shockingly cold narrative, check out 'Code Inconnue' his first French film, which deals with the subject of immigrants to Europe and their integration in his inimitable style. Finally, do see 'The Piano Teacher', which is about a woman on the edge of psychosis, clutching on to 'her' reality through the music of Franz Schubert and Robert Schumann [both of whom, like her, lived on the precipice of madness], and her perverted physical and emotional desires. His last intl. release before Cache is also good, but somehow did not reach the greatness I have come to expect from Haneke. "Hour of the wolf", a post apocalyptic tale is however still a thought provoking film and possibly another good entry into his ouvre [given that his earlier Austrian films are unavailable in DVD/VHS].

Personally, I am eagerly awaiting for "Cache" to be released here in the mid west.



http://film.guardian.co.uk/features/featurepages/0,4120,1690429,00.html


Guilt, lies and videotape

Hidden is the first great film of the 21st century, says Mark Lawson (and that's not just because it's about the presenter of a television arts show)

Friday January 20, 2006
The Guardian

The central character in Michael Haneke's movie Hidden is a culture critic who takes a risk with reputation. The gamble of Georges, a French arts journalist and broadcaster, is personal rather than professional. But the chance I am taking today is purely work-related: it's my contention that Hidden is one of the first great movies of the 21st century.

I am not persuaded of this simply because the protagonist does the same job as I do. The profession of Georges (Daniel Auteuil) is largely a premise for the driving metaphor of Haneke's film, which is that someone whose job is to be watched - Georges is host of a literary discussion programme on French TV - finds himself almost being destroyed by a watcher (who may or may not also be a viewer).

But the importance of this movie is not that it involves the media. There is nothing narrow about the appeal of this piece. The 63-year-old Austrian-born director - previously known for cult successes such as Funny Games (1997), Code Unknown (2000) and The Piano Teacher (2001) - has here made his most mainstream film. Broadcasting, for Haneke, is merely what Hitchcock (who I believe would have loved to have made Hidden) called the McGuffin, the engine for the tension. The film's brilliance is that it is a sweat-inducing thriller that draws on two of the biggest political issues of the time: the surveillance society and national political guilt.

Hidden begins, in every sense, quietly. There is no soundtrack and nothing happens as we watch a sustained, static wide-shot of a pleasant residential street, which, as Haneke has most recently favoured French language and locations for his films, we suspect to be in Paris. Part of the grammar of cinema is that sustained inaction encourages the expectation of a sudden and terrible event, but Haneke initially cheats on this deal. The first action is electronic rather than human, as the image fizz-wipes backwards: a videotape is being rewound.

Now, inside the house of Georges, we discover that the cassette is a two-hour movie of the outside of his house: the latest in a series of these unnervingly literal examples of home-movies to have been pushed through his letterbox. We immediately guess that, while Georges seems to have an utterly enviable life - the living-room is expensively appointed and he's married to Juliette Binoche - Haneke is showing us that there is some kind of gap between his private and public success.

When it becomes clear that Georges's job is to be seen on videotape - his book-chat programme is a version of Bernard Pivot's celebrated highbrow series Apostrophes - the inevitable temptation is to suspect a viewer. Particularly, perhaps, as he hosts an arts show. Are the videotapes a sarcastic suggestion that the discussions he fronts are as interesting as watching dried paint on a front door? Another obvious initial possibility is that Georges has become involved with a woman who is dementedly recording the marital home that she has failed to break. And these days, we inevitably think of terrorism or of surveillance by some secret organisation, presumably with the initials VHS.

An inevitable handicap of writing about a suspense movie (of which, among other things, Hidden is a top-class example) is that the plot has to be protected like a president. It is probably safe only to say that the focus of the stalker-cassettes switches to two other houses (a shabby flat and a rural farmhouse) and that Georges guesses long before us whose finger is on the record button.

There's much less risk in a theme-spoiler: Hidden turns on lies and guilt, individual and collective. One possible reading of the film is that every line of dialogue spoken by every character except one - whether in marital conversations or workplace meetings - is a lie and that the only person who consistently tells the truth is one whose life was destroyed by mendacity. But, even if the script is not as schematic as that, every plot twist in Hidden involves a fib, large or small.

For reasons you don't need a PhD in international studies to appreciate, veracity and conscience have recently become the buzz-topics of western entertainment. (The hit Broadway play of the season, John Patrick Shanley's Doubt, in which a man's life may have been destroyed by a lie, is thematically very similar to Hidden.) On the surface, the political guilt in Hidden is specific to French military history - which can also be seen as a disguised way of tackling the Nazi guilt of Haneke's native Austria - but, from the film's first screening at the Cannes film festival last year, reviewers have drawn parallels with Iraq.

The director, at a festival press conference, was extremely wary of being attached to the anti-war ticket, because the governing mood of the movie is ambiguity and his film is much more than Michael Moore's. Even so, it is quite reasonable to read the film as a parable of political duplicity and it is equally fair to see post-9/11 paranoia (the vulnerability of everyday domestic life) or the CCTV culture in which, without ever having the evidence posted to our homes as Georges does, each of us is taped numerous times a day in our cities, images that will only come to light if we should become a victim or a perpetrator of murder. But, as with all great films, the most resonant messages are visual.

Haneke has always been interested in video - his 1992 film Benny's Video explores the effect of his VHS collection on a child - and Hidden brilliantly exploits the flat, cold, inherently slightly sinister quality of high-definition video. This format works especially well for films (The Constant Gardener is another) in which the characters are permanently uncertain about whether they are being watched.

One of the tricks of Hidden is that most of its images must not look or feel professionally directed. (In this respect, it's the cinematic antithesis of Peter Jackson's King Kong, which yells at us in every sequence that there's a guy with a cheque-book and a megaphone behind the scenes.) The effect of a plot that involves secretly made tapes is that every fresh set-up asks the tense question: who is directing this? At various times we are watching Haneke's movie, the stalker's tapes and Georges's programme. During the film, it also becomes possible that more than one person is involved in recording and sending the threatening cassettes.

For long stretches, Haneke so cleverly accustoms us to the idea that tension derives from nothing happening (the videos sent to Georges are like hate mail on blank sheets of paper) that, when a character finally makes an unexpected sudden movement, it becomes one of the most shocking moments of violence in cinema. Hidden is so dense with mysteries that an important revelation is kept back until the credits sequence and has the effect of making you want immediately to see the movie again.

In his otherwise reticent Cannes press conference, the director mentioned that "you see something happen" during the cinema-emptying frames. These consist of a long wide shot of the steps of a school at home-time as we watch a large group of students, occasionally greeting each other or someone collecting them. This is Haneke's final test of our eyes and the last of the film's commentaries on the reliability of perception. After the screening in Cannes, this sequence proved to be a sort of Rorschach montage in which viewers saw what they expected or wished to see. Different observers believed that they had detected evidence of a death, a divorce or a dispute over paternity. A critic who is a conspiracy theorist saw a clue to the involvement of the French secret service.

Last weekend, in the Sunday New York Times' annual feature in which its reviewers reveal what they believe the Oscar nominations should be, two out of the three critics chose Hidden and Haneke for best picture and director, a very unusual level of praise for a foreign-language film. Those admirers are, of course, also critics and it is possible that the journalistic response to Hidden ever since last year's Cannes simply reflects the generosity of response that a documentary about pigeons would get from the Fancier Gazette. I don't think so, though. Evelyn Waugh's Fleet Street novel Scoop is the favourite book of most journalists but it also happens to be a lasting masterpiece.

[feverpitch]

Just saw Cache for the first time today. Here are my initial reactions:

Without doubt it is an important film! Our local art theatre ran completely empty, except for a small group [of about 5 ppl] of Francophile elderly gentlemen and ladies, and the six of us [myself and a group of friends including Colonel, Cardus, CLR and his wife].*

From my first viewing, I'd say that as with all of his other films, Haneke's Cache is also multilayered. There are familiar musings about the surveillance society we inhabit and the voyeurism it breeds in us [Funny Games, Benny's Video], race/power relations [Code Unknown], violence and its consumption [Funny Games, Piano Teacher], ... all within the restrained mise-en-scene that Haneke uniquely conjures up, deftly brushing away the traces of his brilliant experimentation with the form of the medium, which he constantly questions, challenges and deconstructs.

Once again, narrative closure is brusquely brushed aside, but not without the usual red herrings that would I guess initially provide solace to the viewer expectant of happy endings [where all loose-ends are tied up and served on a platter], only to be disoriented by a subsequent realisation about the spurious rationality that (s)he had unconsciously forced upon the gaps in the narrative to make it more palatable, and the fact that (s)he was actually manipulated towards this particular rationalisation by the power of suggestion!

One new theme which I detected in this film is the disproportionate nature of the response that people with power are likely to bring down on those without, to preserve their status quo. When this is tied to the constant references to the massacre of Algerian refugees in Paris by the French police in 1961, also to the unavoidable 24 hr news channels streaming into the TV screen live from the battlefields of Iraq and Palestine, and the questions of individual and collective guilt that drive the narrative, one got the feeling that Michael Haneke is at last showing signs of becoming more politically engaged, though thankfully, not necessarily more messianic. In a way, all his films have been deeply political, questioning fundamental aspects of the societies we live in, but here, for the first time, he seemed less allegorical and more direct, adopting the garb of a continental European spokesperson through the careful choice of news clips from Iraq showing the harassment and subsequent killing of Italian journalists by trigger happy Yankee doodles [though given the complexities of his films, this itself could be another red herring].

Overall, I guess I'll have to see the film many more times before I can speak with some authority about it, but undoubtedly this another masterpiece!


* On Sunday last, we saw Rang de Basanti at the same theatre, which was packed to the rafters then!

[feverpitch]

And oh! This film is a brilliant critique of David Lynch's Lost Highway [just as Funny Games to me summarily dealt with Oliver Stone's Natural Born Killers]

[feverpitch]

Another article on Hidden [Cache], the film that has stirred many in the intelligensia.

We love Hidden. But what does it mean?

The enigmatic French thriller is the water cooler film of the year, confounding audiences with its ambiguous plot. Jason Solomons asked the director to shed some light...

Sunday February 19, 2006
The Observer

Even in a year when powerful, politically engaged movies abound among the mainstream awards nominations, there is one film everyone is talking about above all others. Despite being absent from the Baftas and Oscars, Hidden (Caché), directed by Michael Haneke, has become the topic of heated conversations around water coolers and over dinner tables across the country. It is on its way to becoming the defining film of a generation.

Hidden is the story of a wealthy Parisian family torn apart when they start receiving videotapes of their house, accompanied by crude, violent drawings. Daniel Auteuil plays Georges Laurent, presenter of a successful literary talk show on TV; Juliette Binoche is his wife, Anne, who works for a publishing house run by an old friend, Pierre. The couple have a 12-year-old son, Pierrot, who competes for his school swimming team. But someone wants to upset this idyll, forcing Georges to unearth a dark secret hidden in his past and buried in his psyche.

Out of this, Haneke crafts a thriller that has audiences twitching with suspicion, letting out gasps at the film's one moment of violence and emerging from the cinema in deep discussion. I can't recall a film in the last decade that has provoked so many theories, nor demanded so many explanations - none of which appear to satisfy, simply feeding the appetite, rather, for second viewings and yet more interpretations.

I rang the director and put five key questions to him in a bid to solve some of Hiddens riddles. Below is what he had to say.

1 Whodunnit?

Is it Majid, the son of Algerian farmhands, sent to an orphanage and now an old man seeking revenge for a ruined life? Or is it Majid's own son, avenging on behalf of his father? Were Pierrot and his school friends playing a prank on the fancy TV star dad, the 'bobos' as Georges refers to himself? Or, as suggested by the much-talked-about final shot of the school steps, are Pierrot and Majid's son in cahoots?

Could it be Georges sending the tapes to himself, trying to frame Majid as a stalker? Or could it even be the film-maker away writing a scenario that the group of friends talk about during the dinner party? I've even seen a suggestion that it was Georges's elderly mother.

Haneke says: 'I'm not going to give anyone this answer. If you think it's Majid, Pierrot, Georges, the malevolent director, God himself, the human conscience - all these answers are correct. But if you come out wanting to know who sent the tapes, you didn't understand the film. To ask this question is to avoid asking the real question the film raises, which is more: how do we treat our conscience and our guilt and reconcile ourselves to living with our actions?

'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?'

2 What is the significance of the shaggy dog story told at the dinner party?

The joke, told by actor Denis Podalydes, brings themes of karma and retribution and of scars from the past remaining visible into the present. It's an unsettling story, which ends in a burst of mock violence, but prepares the way for a sudden act of violence to occur later.

The dinner party is part of Haneke's extended critique of middle-class mores. The guests chat idly of the misfortunes of others, complaining that in divorce, one always has to take sides. Binoche is again wearing one of her sack-like dresses, which are a key part of her deliberately pared-down style.

Haneke says: 'I heard this joke at a dinner party once and thought it so good I wrote it down when I got home and always wanted to use it. I think it sits well here because it makes people ask if it's true or not. If you tell it well, people are never sure if you're joking.'

3 Why swimming?

Pierrot swims for his school and in one scene wins a race, which delights his parents who are attending the gala. In fact, it's the only time we see them happy together. But is this a flashback to a happier time? There is also a mysterious swimming coach, whose voice we hear, and who we see only in silhouette, but he obviously knows Pierrot and his family. 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 after the clashes with the police on 17 October 1961, deaths rarely spoken about in the French media and the riots which made Majid an orphan?

Haneke says: 'We chose swimming because the young actor who plays Pierrot can swim well. It's very simple. If we'd have chosen football or skiing, the audience wouldn't believe he's good enough to be on the team. It's also very cinematic, with the water and the noise - nothing more profound than that.'

4 Why set the story in the media?

Georges lives and breathes books. He's surrounded by them, when he works, relaxes, eats. His set in the TV studio is similarly surrounded by books. His dining room is in a sort of stylish library, where the family take breakfast and dinner and entertain guests. But there is also a library in the living room, although this has books and video tapes in it, with a huge TV in the centre, a screen which becomes increasingly dominant, acting like a window - into Georges's private life and soul, when they play the tapes on it, and onto the world, as news programmes blare away - ignored - in the background, telling of continued wars and colonial-type disputes in Iraq and Palestine.

We also see Georges at work, editing his show, cutting out bits of opinion and conversation he doesn't like. He enjoys the status his fame brings and he's pleased when he hears that a distant relative always watches his programme, or when friends come round to watch the show - but he doesn't always like being watched.

Haneke says: 'I like the multiplicity of books, because each book is different in the mind of each reader. It's the same with this film - if 300 people are in a cinema watching it, they will all see a different film, so in a way there are thousands of different versions of Hidden. The point being that, despite what TV shows us, and what the news stories tell us, there is never just one truth, there is only personal truth.'

5 What clues are in the final scene?

The film ends with a long shot of Pierrot's school steps, with children coming out at the end of the day. We've seen this very static shot before, earlier in the film, when Georges goes to pick his son up. In the final scene, we can make out two crucial characters coming together on the steps. They have a conversation. It's hard to tell if they know each other already or if this is their first meeting, but the conversation seems civil. It's the long shot that makes it seem threatening.

Is this more surveillance footage, from a hidden camera or from a school security camera? Are we being shown, finally, whodunnit? Is this a call to both France and Algeria to deal with the past and move forward together? Or is it the cycle of hatred recommencing, the sins of fathers rippling on into the present?

Haneke says: 'Although this scene happens in silence, I did actually write dialogue for it. The actors are actually speaking it and it might stand as an explanation for some. In any case, that dialogue will never be written in the published screenplay for the film and I told the actors never to reveal it to anyone. They are bound to silence forever and I hope they will have forgotten it by now, because they didn't know when they were shooting it what the significance of the scene might be.'

Do you enjoy deliberately frustrating people? 'I look at it as productive frustration. Films that are entertainments give simple answers but I think that's ultimately more cynical, as it denies the viewer room to think. If there are more answers at the end, then surely it is a richer experience. '

[colonel]

Excellent discussion. Now that you have done an extensive review, I can add what I liked here. Will be a considerable overlap, though.

[achutank]

and as usual poor souls like us will have to wiat for eternity to get to see iton dvd if at all

[colonel]

i can tell you how to download it if you want.

[cardus]

Great film, beyond a doubt. See it if you see only one film this year.