Caché and the Private/Public Secret
113.2
Headnote
Michael Haneke's Caché balances cinema and politics on a double axis. Cinematically it looks back to Alfred Hitchcock's Rear Window (1954), a gripping examination of voyeurism and mysterious goings on; politically, Caché anticipates the tensions of "Eurabia," the fast-approaching day of reckoning for the continent of Europe, when it will have to come to terms with its growing and antipathetic Arab population. This is a film about privacy and invasion, family and guilty history, and its merciless gaze becomes our own.
THE FILM begins with a seemingly endless shot of a narrow Parisian street, with the camera centred on the entrance to a stylish little home. Only when the image jerks into fastforward do we realize that we are watching a videotape - and we are watching it along with the residents of the house. We listen to their voices as they puzzle over the meaning of what they are seeing, its origin and purpose.
Georges Laurent (Daniel Auteuil) is a prominent Paris television personality whose talk-show focuses on literature and public affairs. His wife Anne (Juliette Binoche) is a publisher. Their 12-year-old son Pierrot (Lester Makedonsky), "battling with puberty," seems only interested in Eminem, competitive swimming, Erik L'Homme's teenage sci-fi thrillers (e.g. Chien-de-la-lune) and hanging out with his friends. Their chic downtown address is the perfect setting for dinner parties and intellectual repartee.
But this affluent family is shaken as they receive more and more of the mysterious videotapes. As they watch the first, a static two-hour view of the front of their home, Georges and Anne have no idea what to make of it. They wonder if it is some sort of prank or artistic statement cooked up by a friend. They fret that it may be the work of some deranged fan of Georges' program.
Their concern grows as they watch a videotaped automobile trip through the countryside - right up to the courtyard of the charming farmhouse where Georges grew up. As the tapes grow more personal and invasive they begin to be accompanied by childish drawings of a face, a rooster, then an advertisement's photo of Georges - each with a bloodlike smear of red from the mouth or from a slashed throat.
Georges suggests that this might be some game involving Pierrot and his classmates. But then a bloody cartoon postcard is sent to Pierrot at school, allegedly from his father. As the graphic assault grows more and more alarming, Georges finally narrows his focus to the only potential culprit who makes sense. He finds himself waking fearfully from disturbing dreams of a young boy. The dark-skinned child appears in Georges' nightmares with blood smeared around his mouth; then the dreams begin to take on an even more menacing tone. Georges gnaws on these memories, but is too embarrassed to relate his suspicions to Anne. In lengthening visions, Georges' conscious mind and his nightmares dig the story out of his subconscious, and finally he decides to share it with his wife.
MAJID was a child, about the same age as Georges, whose parents worked on the Laurents' farm. In 1961, as the violence escalated toward the end of the long Algerian war of independence, Majid's mother and father made their way to Paris to take part in the mass demonstrations against emergency measures restricting the rights of Muslim residents of France. During the riots that followed, Majid's parents were among the hundreds of Algerians killed by police - who either disappeared behind closed doors or were found floating in the Seine. The Laurents, appalled by the smirking indifference of the authorities to the fate of two "jigaboos," transcended the bitter prejudice of their time and decided to adopt the orphaned Majid.
As Georges slowly comes to admit, at the age of six he bitterly resented Majid's presence in his parents' house, and soon began a campaign of lies against him. He tried to convince his parents that the Arab boy had been coughing up blood and was thus a threat to the family's health. Then he maliciously told Majid that Laurent père had ordered him to kill a belligerent rooster. When Majid bloodied himself in the process, Georges told his parents that his rival had killed the bird in order to terrorize him. To restore their family security, the Laurents finally took a drastic and painful step. When Georges visits his ailing mother (Annie Girardot), the old woman claims she can barely remember Majid, perhaps preferring to erase the unhappy, guilt-ridden memory.
Soon another videotape directs Georges - via Avenue Lenin - to a shabby high-rise tenement, and then through its dingy hallway to a numbered flat. Inevitably, he makes his way to this very door, rings the bell, and waits. Within seconds he is standing face-to-face with a dumbstruck middle-aged man. Majid (Maurice Bénichou) remarks that he has seen Georges on television, although it is clear that Georges would never have been able to recognize Majid. Georges quickly comes to the point - the games must end, and he threatens that any further harassment of his family will lead to the sort of violence that - as an intellectual - he has come to view as "repugnant." Majid looks at him with consternation, and flatly denies any knowledge of the tapes and cartoons or any intention to blackmail or harass Georges. They part without anything being resolved, yet Majid concludes, "I'm glad you came."
After this, the video log only grows more strange. Georges lies to Anne, telling her that he had found the flat abandoned, but soon they receive yet another tape, this one chronicling the meeting between Georges and Majid, and capturing Majid's tortured sobs after Georges' departure.
Enraged by the continuing video terrorism, Georges returns to Majid's flat. There he is stunned to find himself facing Majid's teenage son (Walid Afkir), who is even more emphatic in denying that either he or his father has been sending the videotapes to Georges' house. He is, however, bitterly aware of his parent's tragic past, and accuses Georges of cheating Majid out of his education, and banishing him to an orphanage where what was taught was "hatred, not politeness." The son defiantly tells Georges that despite all Majid's disadvantages, he has proved to be a fine and loving father.
Amid Georges and Anne's growing anxiety - and simmering mutual mistrust - Pierrot fails to return home one night. Convinced that his son has been kidnapped, Georges takes the police straight to Majid's flat. Father and son are hauled away in a police van, interrogated, and jailed overnight. Meanwhile the Laurents wait for word of Pierrot, distracted only by the television news reports on America's intervention in the Middle East and yet more Palestinian strife. It turns out that Pierrot has simply stayed overnight at a friend's - but his sullen response to his parents' anxiety reveals yet more family suspicions and resentments, hidden just beneath the surface.
Finally, Georges is called from his editing suite to meet Majid back at the same flat where their first awkward reunion was so mysteriously recorded. The Algerian reiterates his innocence, then suddenly pulls out a straight razor and slashes his own throat. His blood sprays the wall like the red smears on the drawings. Within seconds, his tortured life is over. The terrified Georges flees the scene and hides in a cinema, where the marquee posters replay the family tragedy: Ma mere, Deux freres, Son film...
But there is no hiding from Majid's son, who confronts Georges at the TV station and tells him he has long "wondered what a man's life on one's conscience feels like." Cryptically, he confides that Georges has finally shown him.
Georges goes home and crawls into bed. In his dreams, he recalls the heartbreaking scene from forty years before, when the van from the orphanage arrived to take Majid away. As the boy struggles and runs from the orderly, the Laurents retreat inside their comfortable house, so they will not have to see him caught and dragged into the vehicle.
HANEKE adopts Alfred Hitchcock's sense of the voyeurism in film watching, implicating the spectator in the intrusion into private lives. But where Rear Window's protagonist (Jimmy Stewart) solves a murder through his spying, Haneke's film never identifies the voyeur, and so leaves the plot's mystery unsolved. Denied Hitchcock's version of justice and social order, Caché 's viewer is left complicit with the callous observer.
The Laurents live at an intersection with Rue des Iris, where the video stalker first sets up. The viewer's implication is explicit in the opening and closing shots, the film's framework. The establishing shot places us behind the viewfinder of the voyeur, but the plot makes us empathize with the viewed. The long shots are ambiguous. Are we watching an event in the film or its taping? The first tapes are static, but then the camera pivots to follow Georges as he walks to his car. The director has adopted the stalker's perspective.
This strategy has several implications. One, any action or situation can resonate, as a recording replays its moment. Two, in a world of class conflict and injustice, we can never be confident about our own assumptions. The most placid surface may roil beneath. We sometimes think we are viewing a still image - then something moves. Three, every action has both a public and a private definition. What actually "happens" remains uncertain, as Georges demonstrates through his restless memories.
Majid's banishment is shown in one stationery long shot, the perspective of the six-year-old Georges, cowering in the dark barn as his scheme finally plays out. His frozen conscience plays the scene like a hidden video camera. In this visual confession, Georges finally accepts responsibility for the tragedy that has prompted this strange conflict. Early in the story, Georges wonders of the video stalker, "How come I didn't see him?" In the end, it is because he, not his pursuer, is the source of the evil.
Typical of the genre, the absence of any criminal act precludes police action, and Georges has to investigate himself. Little does he realize that he will in fact investigate himself, and ultimately will be forced to acknowledge his own guilt. Though the police accept his version of events, Georges' false front crumbles. His public image is empty form, like his TV show's set, a painted backdrop of empty bookforms. Despite his "prestige and viewing figures," he finds his career at risk when his boss (Bernard le Coq) receives a copy of the tape in which he threatens Majid.
The Laurents' home is, of course, lined with shelves of books and videotapes. But a continuous painting stretching over two walls in the living room - a short, wide abstract of a weaving black line across a blue background - serves as an emblem for the family members' respective subconscious, Georges as he digs up memories, Anne as she confronts her empty and dishonest marriage, and Pierrot as he faces his parents' guilt.
THE FILM'S last shot completes the point of the first. A stationery record of a school emptying of its students seems taken by someone standing behind a black van, shooting past a guard rail, as if another video stalker were investigating another buried guilt. In the shot's duration and detachment we are free to select our own points of significance from teeming activity.
Complacently, we could just observe the flow of life.
Or we may read the social comforts of these students' lives, their apparent community- and the virtual absence of children of colour. The shot conveys white privilege. For all France's passionate intellectual liberalism, the country's imperialist past persists in the struggles of its huge disadvantaged Arab underclass.
An earlier "live" shot of Pierrot approaching his father's car sets up the stationery (i.e. "taped") shot that ends the film. The parallel images record the white Paris that has failed to accommodate - or even truly acknowledge - its immigrant underclass. Majid typifies the countless Arabs denied the country's privileged education. The apparent complacency in that last shot in effect foreshadowed the fall 2005 Muslim riots that began in Paris' suburbs and soon spread throughout France. The newsreel footage of burning cars and looted stores seems the implicit consequence of the complacency in Haneke's last shot.
This long take provides an inconclusive ending because Haneke has not identified who sent the tapes, and so this seemingly innocuous shot possesses an extra charge. The individual white intellectual's story of betrayal and guilt hangs unresolved because ultimately it is insignificant in the context of Majid's heartbreaking story and the multitude of tragedies it represents - all framed out of that last shot, for the comfort of the white-baguette Parisian. (And, of course, the "success" of the white students' recent rioting in Paris - when the government caved to their demands - only emphasizes the futility of the poor Arabs' earlier mob action.)
And yet - and yet, if you drop that complacency to dig into that last take, you can find one individuated relationship within the general flow. By eschewing the emphasis of close-up, zoom, or edit, Haneke leaves us to solve the mystery on our own.
Majid's son strides in from the right front, and goes up the wide steps to join Pierrot and a friend at the top left. The two boys descend towards the left in spirited conversation. Majid's son does most of the talking, as if reporting his exchange with Georges. The boys are friendly and animated, and then Majid's son strides off to the right foreground, while Pierrot returns to his friends at the top left, then leaves with them in the left foreground. After this one collaboration, the sons of the poor Algerian immigrant and the wealthy white journalist go back to their separate worlds. Majid's son is never named, as if his father's plight has forever limited the son's identity as well.
The implication - if we reach in for the secret Haneke has planted is that the boys are the friends their fathers might have been. Pierrot has escaped the double tradition of his father's selfishness and his namesake's theatrical detachment. Recovering his grandparents' embrace of the Algerian, he has collaborated to redress the familial injustice. It would appear that the boys staged Pierrot's brief disappearance, sent the increasingly disturbing tapes and violent drawings, and even deflected Georges' suspicions by sending the card to Pierrot.
In contrast to Georges' sophisticated media work, the Warholy videos and childish sketches are very much the work of children. Their directness and simplicity are more pure than Georges' manipulated reality - as when he edits a "free" discussion for dramatic effect. With Majid's suicide, the virtual parricide points to the enormity of what may be expected of a family - or of France, Europe, perhaps Western Civilization, to amend for its history of abuse in the East.
IN THE END, all this dispels our easy assurance that everything will be solved when the next generation learns from our political history. Given the intensity of the felt injustice, the vision of the future would not appear to be comforting. In this respect, the film exposes the naïveté of much of the left-wing liberalism that frames out the history behind current political tensions. Ça va faire des histoires.
AuthorAffiliation
MAURICE YACOWAR is presently working on a biography of painter and novelist John Bratby.
Copyright Queen's Quarterly Summer 2006
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