Demob Happy

The secret history

9/10

Caché - ‘Hidden’ - directed by Michael (The Piano Teacher) Haneke, is a masterclass on how to unnerve your audience, not through what you necessarily show but by what is indeed hidden from view. Georges (Daniel Auteil) and Anne (Juliette Binoche) are a bourgeois Parisian couple with a teenage son. Georges is presenter and producer of a literary debate tv show, a man with the power to edit the discussion within his programme and present an alternative version of the past to his viewers. But has Georges been economical with the truth of his family history? He and his wife begin receiving videotapes of their home, apparently filmed from across the street. The same viewpoint frustratingly forced upon the viewer in the opening credit sequence, this is one of many static shots in the film that provoke as many questions as they might at first seem to resolve. What at a first glance appear to be voyeuristic recordings in fact give nothing away.

More tapes follow - as do disturbing, childlike drawings of decapitated chickens, which hark back to a memory of Georges’, which is made manifest in a nightmare. Is it an elborate prank being played by their son, who suspects his mother to be having an affair with a family friend, or something more sinister? Georges tracks down what he believes is the culprit to an estate in the Paris suburbs. There he is reunited with a man he has not seen since he was six years old, an orphaned Algerian who Georges’ family had looked after as a boy when his parents were killed in the Paris massacre of immigrants in 1961. But Georges has a guilty secret. Did he, as a young boy, set up this Algerian orphan to be sent to a mental institution? Flashbacks give suggestions but, again, frustratingly, the full reality of the situation is obscured.

Caché skillfully and subtly plays with audience expectations, with most of its inner tensions unresolved apart from one brief and terrifyingly visceral moment. Against convention, this moment of extreme violence - as it involves the death of a key character - seeks to further bury and obstruct our access to the truth, while simultaneously heightening the suspence. The film could also be construed as a metaphor for France’s inability come to terms with its relationship with Algeria, arrogantly rewriting its colonial past. But like much of the narrative, this is not made explicit, but is rather a further provocation in a film filled with subtle antagonisms. Brilliant.