A LOOK BACK: ‘Caché’ is one of the best thrillers in recent memory
Placing Juliette Binoche and Daniel Auteuil in the same movie should be reason enough to rejoice. But putting them in a film by famed director Michael Haneke, whose Amour is winning just about every film prize this year, is pure magic. Caché, an exquisite French thriller from a few years ago, is the movie that cinephiles have been waiting for. It’s an intense character study that treats its characters with as much respect as the convoluted plot. We watch the meticulous unraveling of a marriage as a mysterious stranger lurks nearby. It’s a film filled with question marks, with very little catharsis or natural rhythm, and that seems perfectly satisfying. How refreshing it is to stray from the usual.
Binoche and Auteuil play Anne and Georges, a married couple living a near-perfect life in modern-day Paris. Their son attends the local school, and Georges is well-known because of his duties as a TV literary critic. Theirs is a busy life, but a fulfilling one.
And then the videotapes start to arrive.
Similar to the premise to a horror film, Georges begins receiving strange videotapes in the mail that have footage of his family. It’s obvious because of the visuals that someone is taping their personal lives, but there’s no attached letter or apparent motive. The only other correspondence involves unsettling drawings that accompany the tapes, but nothing seems to point toward an understandable reason for the development.
In our post-9/11 age, this breach of security at the personal level takes on a different, far scarier meaning. There’s a real sense of violation when Georges watches these tapes, but yet there’s nothing apparently violent tied to the evidence. They family is left in terror, thrown into a tailspin of second guesses. But where’s the follow-through crime? What happens next? What does the voyeur want?
Naturally, the pressures of these videotapes begin to affect the tight family dynamic. Georges and Anne don’t have a playbook for this unusual chain of events, and they’re unsure of what to do (if anything). This causes much anxiety and stress.
Haneke, who also wrote the screenplay, is so dedicated to his story that he never lets it veer off course. Everything is conducted in the subtlest of ways; there’s no great reveals or far-fetched plot points. These characters, even when dealing with such personal horror, keep a rationale brain. This is more of an Alfred Hitchcock movie than a thrilling genre staple.
Binoche and Auteuil are solid, as to be expected. They have both carved out wonderfully diverse careers, and Caché offers some of their best performances. They both can play these seemingly average husband-wife roles with such ease and realism that it’s like watching … well, it’s like watching footage from an actual home video. Scary.
By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com
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Caché
2005
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Written and directed by Michael Haneke
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Starring Juliette Binoche and Daniel Auteuil
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Running time: 117 minutes
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Rated R for brief strong violence
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Rating:
