Michael Haneke, “Caché / Hidden” (2005)
An imaginative if overly layered thriller about a couple threatened by an unseen and unknown stalker, Michael Haneke’s “Hidden” is a film about guilt and how its projection onto others can have the most catastrophic consequences that can last for generations. Georges (Daniel Auteuil) and Anne (Juliette Binoche) are a middle-aged Paris couple with a teenage son, Pierrot (Lester Makedonsky), whose snugly bourgeois life-style – he’s a TV show host, she works for a publisher – is disturbed by a series of sinister videotapes and drawings being left on their door-step that suggest that someone is spying on them. Georges interprets the drawings and cassettes as referencing past childhood memories and deducts that someone called Majid, whom his parents once adopted as a child and then had institutionalised after a chicken decapitation incident, is the culprit behind the parcels. Through one of the videotapes he and his wife view, he tracks down Majid (Maurice Bénichou), now a grown man, and harasses him. The ugly contact between the two men leads to disaster for Majid, a simmering enmity between Georges and Majid’s young adult son and tension in Georges’ marriage and family life that may not have a good resolution.
Through Georges and Anne’s reactions to the videotapes, we see how they become two quite unpleasant and unsympathetic characters and the effect their behaviour has on each other and on their teenage son who soon becomes alienated from them. We see how the marriage has been slowly falling apart over the years, to the extent that when Georges visits his mother and she asks after his wife and son, he admits that he does not know very much about what his wife does. The arrival of the mysterious parcels is the catalyst for the marriage’s disintegration as Georges refuses to share important information with his wife and she starts to doubt his love and loyalty for her. We see the initial stirrings of an affair Anne may have with one of her and her husband’s social circle, a man who happens to be married to another of their friends; thus, the couple’s social circle may eventually break up. Pierrot already suspects his mother is unfaithful.
Georges’ feelings of guilt over the way he and his parents treated Majid as a child, and his mother’s attitude towards Majid’s welfare – she does not remember the episode when he speaks to her about it – is a metaphor for France’s treatment of its colonies in Africa and elsewhere, and how the French pretend not to know or remember how their subject peoples were often dispossessed of their lands and other resources, expected to adopt French culture, and suffered alienation from their own cultures as a result. The metaphor can be extended to other European and Western countries that also founded colonies on other continents and robbed the indigenous peoples there of their lands and destroyed their cultures. Majid’s meeting with Georges and Georges’ subsequent harassment of him and his son lead to personal disaster for Majid, at which we question who is really the victim and who is the bully in the wider post-9/11 context that the film was made in and which it subtly references for Western audiences.
The film is remarkable in the way Haneke stages several shots so as to appear like a stage drama in which the audience is forced to be complicit in the action, in the manner of Alfred Hitchcock’s famous film “Rear Window”. Viewers are invited to speculate on who is sending the videotapes and the drawings, and even to anticipate what will happen next. The low-key and quiet nature of the film itself forces it to be a character-driven piece dependent on the skills of the actors, and in this endeavour, Auteuil, Binoche and Bénichou do not disappoint. A death scene is treated almost as Greek tragedy in its stage-drama shot; the audience is almost expected to act as a Greek chorus. The film’s slow and easy pace and its cool, almost icy style mirror the bourgeois class’s studied indifference to emotions and unresolved inner conflicts that can erupt unexpectedly over innocent things. The events that occur during the film and Georges’ interpretation of them leave him in an infantile state as he withdraws into a cocoon-like bedroom, takes sleeping tablets and curls up in bed.
Comparisons between Haneke’s film and Alfred Hitchcock’s work are apt: the videotapes and drawings themselves serve as MacGuffin devices that in themselves have no meaning except for Georges who imposes a personal narrative based on unresolved guilt on them. The fact that he and wife Anne work in media-related industries, in which truth can be edited and shaped by canny producers and directors to fit narratives that appeal to audience expectations and exploit their desires and fears, is significant: here Georges, initially the exploiter of dreams and desires, ends up being the exploited one. The irony is that having been exploited, Georges is then driven to more acts of lies and exploitation to drive away and repress his fears further to no avail.
The film’s closing scene in which Pierrot meets Majid’s son and has a conversation with him can have many interpretations including a conspiracy and reconciliation; it rather spoils the thriller template that the film hangs from but then that’s my problem to deal with. If anything, the film is overburdened by Haneke’s intellectual gaming with the audience and over-layering of the idea of “hidden”. A little less cleverness on Haneke’s part tooling the plot and its implications and references, and “Hidden” would have been a perfect film.