Candid camera

Caché unhinges an ugly history

By Susan Gerhard

susan@sfbg.com

Nations, like corporations, cannot logically be said to have "personalities," but if you did have to dress one up and give it a leading role, you might hand the part to Daniel Auteuil. The perfectly self-satisfied pot belly poking from an upright, unselfconscious torso connected to the kind of stone face that obstructs emotion and deflects accusation, Auteuil – as literary-critic-under-duress Georges Laurent in Michael Haneke's new chiller, Caché (Hidden) – perfectly embodies a country, any country, clothing itself in victimization so it can numbly march itself off to war.

Georges, a TV talk show figurehead used to controlling his own image, is the executive branch of a family that finds its life suddenly, creepily, observed, a fact that Georges and his wife, Anne (Juliette Binoche), discover inside a plastic bag left at their doorstep. What we, the audience, see as the beginning of the film is one of Haneke's trademark fixed shots – a clear, plain view of an unremarkable home in an upper-middle class neighborhood in Paris. What we don't realize until the image breaks down into fast-forward and rewind modes and two extradiegetic voices replace the twittering birds in the soundscape, is that we're not watching the movie, but a movie – a tape given to the now-worried Georges and Anne that features nothing but ... themselves.

Haneke has enjoyed placing his bourgeois characters in difficult situations (see also "apocalypse," "sadomasochism," "rape," "torture," and "murder" in films from the Euro-productions Time of the Wolf and The Piano Teacher on back to his Austrian filmmaking roots). So you'd expect, early on, that the convivial ritual of dining with friends inside the well-rigged home, each wall crammed with books, or videos, or booze, will soon become very, very dark. Dimly lit interstitials, car alarms, Haneke's lingering camera set the mood. But the director's well-honed habit of withholding information also serves this plot incredibly well. As the videos – and accompanying creepy cards, which feature childlike drawings of blood, chickens, faces – increase in intensity, we know less about what might be motivating them than Georges thinks he does. Soon he'll be asked by a congress of his wife, his boss, and his increasingly alienated son for explanations he doesn't feel like offering. So Georges strips the enlightened literary critic facade and tries to hunt down his harasser himself.

It's no accident that Haneke peppers Georges' quest with the language of the first world's latest war – Georges is trying to find out who is "terrorizing" his family. If, he tells his wife, they admit they are afraid, or if he admits he might hold any blame, he believes they'd be "acting exactly as he [the terrorist] wants." When he finally faces down his supposed tormenter, the man, sad, subdued, wearily explains, "Kicking my ass won't leave you any wiser about me."

But here's a spoiler you don't need me to spell out: It's Georges who will squirm. What he is actually forced to face, but refuses, is his own guilty conscience. What nation-state ever has? Haneke weaves into the story France's once-suppressed history of a 1961 protest in which hundreds of Algerians were killed, some drowned: Georges' parents were going to adopt the son of their workers, who died at the protest. But a jealous Georges, age six, tells lies that make them send the boy to an orphanage instead. "What wouldn't we do not to lose what's ours?" the grown man now asks Georges. Just like Haneke's final image, another lingering, long-shot look at a scene with puzzling implications, it's a question that only opens up many more.

CACHÉ Opens Fri/27 Embarcadero Center Cinema 1 Embarcadero Center, Promenade Level, SF (415) 267-4893 Albany Twin 1115 Solano Ave., Albany (510) 464-5980 www.sonyclassics.com/cache