Caché

Saw this on Thursday night, and it was also pretty good. Bleak, though, as only a movie written and directed by Michael Haneke can be. It's even more violent than the Piano Teacher, but without the disturbing sexual element that made that movie so hard to watch. Georges (Daniel Auteuil) and Anne (Juliette Binoche), a well cultured (and well heeled) Parisian couple, find a videotape on the front stoop of their urban home. It turns out to be video of the front of that home - very boring surveillance footage that is unnerving because it's so inexplicable. It's creepy for the viewer because it is the very footage that opens up the movie, and the possiblity that the hunt Georges and Anne embark on will end with us must certainly be part of Haneke's intention. Especially, I think, if you're an American. Georges' search takes him through some dream sequences from his childhood, to his mother, and eventually to the apartment of an Algerian he'd grown up with. Their are hints of violence to come, beginning with the paranoia sketched out at the beginning, but it definitely goes way over the top. Haneke poses some fairly interesting questions with his PoMo style, somewhat similar to his approach in Funny Games. I wonder whether these questions aren't undercut somwhat by the violence, which is shocking in the extreme. Georges is a frankly unlikable character (though very well played by Auteil), and the charater Majid (Maurice Bénichou, who is also very good) was interesting enough to warrant a great deal more fleshing out. As Isabelle Huppert was able to do so well in The Piano Teacher.