Directed by Michael Haneke
Cache, by Austrian misanthrope Michael Haneke, joins The Interpreter, Lord of War, Good Night and Good Luck, Syriana and A History of Violence as one of this year’s many specious political dramas made laughable by the complexity and brilliance of Spielberg’s Munich. There’s no use pretending that the conventional ways filmmakers pander to the public’s guilt and fears are acceptable any longer now that we have the example of a movie that persistently scrutinizes its characters’ ethics and that does not sacrifice enlightenment for mere excitation.
Besides, Cache isn’t exciting anyway. When critics praise it, they’re congratulating their own bland sense of titillation; going along with Haneke’s thesis that mere recognition of the West’s guilt (in this film’s case, France’s lingering self-reproach over the Algerian Occupation from the ‘50s to the ‘60s) is tantamount to intellectual and moral progress. Haneke’s middle-class preoccupation is conveniently “remorseful;” its bleakness evades the reality of Europe’s changing ethnic profile (a development better represented in recent films by Andre Techine, the Dardennes brothers, the Ducastel-Martineau team and others).
Cache is cannily customized for the empowered middle-class. Daniel Auteuil and Juliette Binoche play Georges and Anne Laurent, an affluent Parisian couple (he hosts a literary TV talk show and she works for a highbrow book publisher) who are troubled by stalkers. Plagued by ominous hand-drawn notes depicting bloody animal slaughter and surreptitious videotapes of his family, Georges’ pursuit of his nuisance becomes an intellectually-spooked version of Charles Bronson’s revenge drama Death Wish. His guilt lets Haneke exacerbate the too-close encroachment of people from different ethnic groups and class strata.
Georges’ inquiry is partly about national wounds that won’t heal. He has blocked memories of Majid, an orphaned Algerian boy his parents considered adopting after a 1961 atrocity where French police drowned 200 immigrant protestors in the Seine. As a monied lad from the provinces, Georges himself jealously mistreated Majid (even tricking him into slaughtering the family rooster) and now feels that the chickens have come home to roost. To say that this film predicted or inspired the recent conflagrations in Paris’ banlieues would be as dangerously naïve as New York Magazine and the Post panicking that Spike Lee’s Do The Right Thing would cause riots in 1989.
Haneke is unconcerned with insurrection or catharsis. Animated by a nagging fear of the Other, Cache justifies its moral listlessness by urging viewers to share the white bourgeoisie’s sense of being besieged. This gets us nowhere. And after Munich, it plainly retards the way cinema can take audiences beyond the conventional political discourse in movies that typically side with whomever financed them. In Cache, this casual prejudice comes in the guise of aesthetic formalism.
Haneke’s central conceit—that Georges is being surveilled by a hidden camera and watched by person(s) unknown—employs a pseudo-profound self-consciousness. It’s a trope from early Atom Egoyan films, but is catnip to critics who never grasped the p.o.v. complexity of Femme Fatale, My Life on Ice or Garçon Stupide. Haneke foregrounds camera technique (the unidentified eye spying on the bourgeois patriarch) by mystifying video technology—the medium currently overtaking film and so favored by trendies. But he does so for the dullest reasons.
At last fall’s press conference for Cache’s New York Film Festival screening, Haneke made gassy pronouncements, wondering “If film aspires to be an art form...” It made one question Haneke’s understanding of what film can do. He’s at least a century too late to be hailed as a visionary who explores the medium’s potential. Haneke’s simple-minded thrall with video-viewing makes Cache the new The Blair Witch Project. Third World immigrants are the boogey men and the non-plussed central characters (superbly modulated by Auteuil and Binoche) become naïfs who are scared of their own shadows.
Trouble is, Haneke’s technique—calm, Kubrick-precise camera placement—doesn’t disrupt the well-heeled couple’s placidity. (The only hint of realism is a street confrontation between Georges and a menacing African bike messenger.) This reliance on video gimmickry merely toys with shallow social perception similar to Cronenberg’s anti-American neo-noir A History of Violence (except that Georges is too cerebral to kick ass). Cache lacks the genuine political inquiry of Alain Resnais’ 1964 Muriel, which palpably manipulated vision and time as cinematic properties that better examined the moral complexity of France’s then-hot Algerian predicament.
Haneke’s aspiration to artistry is hideously high-toned. His awe of video technology hinders how race and colonialism can be addressed in Western social tradition. Nothing in Cache compares to the key scene in Munich where Spielberg posits human progress through art (when a Palestinian professor of literature articulates “the relation of narrative to survival”). Highbrow Haneke prefers concocting token Algerian characters like Majid (Maurice Benichou) and his son (Walid Afkir) merely to prod George and Anne’s insularity. The Other remains expendable. Europe exploits Algeria again.
