Contents Acknowledgments 6 Introduction: Beginnings and Endings 8 1 Whodunit? 18 2 Home and the Family 39 3 Politics and Memory 56 4 Screens and Spectators 70 Conclusion: Hidden Meanings? 84 Notes 88 Credits 92 Bibliography 96
18 BFI FILM CLASSICS 1 Whodunit? Because Caché refuses to provide answers to the questions it poses, watching it can be a decidedly frustrating experience for some viewers. That exclamation of What the hell?! issued by my friend was not only a question about what happened at the end of the film, a request for answers, but a cry of grievance and an expression of anger. The expectation that we will eventually be given some closure that we will learn who it is that is sending the tapes and why they are doing it, and that we will ultimately find some catharsis at the film s close is set up from the outset by Haneke s deployment of formal and narrative tropes recognisable to the audience as belonging to the thriller genre. When these expectations are frustrated, then so too are we. So while a reading of Caché as a straightforward thriller is not only a restrictive, but also an arguably wrong-headed, move, it does nonetheless open up ways of understanding certain responses to the film. Reduced to its bare bones, Caché is the story of Georges and Anne Laurent (Daniel Auteuil and Juliette Binoche), a pair of comfortably off, complacent middle-class Parisian intellectuals (of the sort known as bobos or bourgeois bohemians in France). He hosts a long-running literary talk show based on the model of Bernard Pivot s Bouillon de culture; she works for a publishing house. Their twelve-year-old son Pierrot (Lester Makedonsky) is moody and occasionally difficult but an accomplished athlete and apparently conscientious student. The tape that we first hear them discussing is followed by others, the contents of which comprise surveillance of their day-to-day lives and which are sometimes accompanied by childlike drawings of sinister images: figures with blood pouring from their mouths and a cockerel with a bloodied neck. (These drawings bear similarities to another series of images
C ACHÉ 19 which begin to intrude with no clear narrative motivation, they appear to show a boy coughing up blood and staring silently at the camera; later we come to suspect they are memory-images or flashbacks, leading us, as Libby Saxton points out, to make a link between contemporary events and historical ones). 7 A call to the police is futile, but the drawings suggest a potential culprit to Georges. However, his refusal to disclose his suspicions to Anne creates tensions between the couple. When another tape suggests the stalker s address, Georges tracks down a man who, for want of a better phrase, could be described as his former foster brother, to his tenement-block home. This man, whose name is Majid (Maurice Bénichou), expresses surprise at Georges s visit (although he recognises the adult Georges from his television show), but seems non-plussed at this sudden emergence of a figure from his past. Georges accuses Majid of making and sending the tapes as revenge for an unspecified incident that occurred when they were were children; Majid denies all knowledge of them. Nonetheless, Georges panicked by the arrival of tapes at his workplace and the apparent disappearance of his son later calls the police to arrest Majid and his own teenage son (Walid Afkir), who are eventually released without charge. 8 A subsequent invitation brings Georges back to Majid s apartment, where he witnesses Majid s shocking, violent suicide. Returning home, he confesses to Anne that a series of childhood lies that Georges told had resulted in Majid being expelled from his family home, and placed in an orphanage. Some time later, Georges is accosted at work by Majid s son, but denies any responsibility for his father s death. In the film s final scene, as we have discussed, Majid and Georges s sons can be glimpsed meeting. Like Haneke s earlier Funny Games (filmed in Austria in 1997, but subsequently remade more or less shot-by-shot by Haneke himself in North America and released in 2008), 9 Caché draws on the well-worn scenario of the family under threat from an outside force: echoing elements of Adrien Lyne s Fatal Attraction (1987), or the two
20 BFI FILM CLASSICS versions of Cape Fear directed by J. Lee Thompson (1962) and Martin Scorsese (1991), amongst other films. 10 But whereas in Funny Games suspense was generated by the question of when and how a family taken hostage might escape their torturers, in Caché it arises out of the epistemological conundrum of who is persecuting Georges and why. The terms of engagement are set out in the very first scene, when the characters discuss the mysterious object left in a plastic bag on their porch. As we gradually realise that this object is the tape we are watching, the characters voice our own concerns: where was the unseen cameraman? Why didn t Georges, who we see walking directly past the lens, see him? In the words of the protagonist himself, Whose idea of a joke could this be? These are the questions that drive the narrative, and our involvement with it, throughout the film. Two scenes in particular demonstrate Haneke s awareness of, and facility with, the conventions of the thriller. The first sees Anne and Georges gathered with four of their friends around the dining table in their elegant Parisian apartment. We join the dinner party mid-flow, with Yvon (Denis Podalydès) in the early stages of recounting a recent encounter with an elderly lady in a restaurant. Georges walks past the spot where the diegetic camera should be positioned
C ACHÉ 21 The camera is at a distance, sufficiently far enough from the action to take in the whole of the table, and is trained on Yvon s animated face; with the exception of Anne, who sits to Yvon s left, and the woman immediately to his right, the other characters are viewed either at oblique angles or with their backs to us. As his story gathers steam, Yvon offers a majestic lesson in raconteurship. Looking at each member of his audience in turn, he moves briskly from one stage of the story to the next (while they nod or prompt with half-murmurs), Yvon recounts a shaggy-dog story during the Laurents dinner party
22 BFI FILM CLASSICS pausing briefly at certain points to allow tension to build. As he reaches the eventual denouement, he firmly implicates his audience in the action of his story, leaving a longer pause as he takes Anne s hand and, as she is at her most enthralled, delivers a rousing shock, sending all into fits of nervous laughter. A neat piece of self-reflexivity, the scene serves both as a model of what a thriller might look like and as a reminder that truth and fiction are not so easily distinguished, a theme that is central to Caché. When one guest asks, finally, whether the story was true, the group response is another gale of laughter. It is perhaps a clue to the ultimate irrelevance of the question. 11 Later in the film, Haneke offers an altogether more sinister take on the genre. Following an extended scene of Georges visiting his mother, and bidding her goodnight, the camera cuts to Anne talking on the phone at a book launch (presumably talking to Georges), then abruptly, disorientatingly, to a flapping chicken in extreme close-up. Before we can process the image there is a blur of movement as an axe falls violently down, severing the bird s head. There then follows a sequence of very quick cuts: 1. A medium close-up of a small boy brandishing an axe, framed against a yard. Blood spurts over his face. 2. A distant shot of the same boy in profile standing, axe in hand, over the chopping block, the chicken flailing furiously some distance away. 3. A reverse-shot to another small boy, bearing a facial resemblance to Daniel Auteuil, looking shocked. 4. A close-up of the bloodied boy, turning towards the spot where the boy who we now assume is the young Georges (whose point of view we now recognise) is standing. 5. A close-up of young Georges, looking stricken. 6. A close-up of the flailing chicken. 7. A close-up of young Georges, his eyes moving from the apparent location of the beheaded chicken to that of the bloody boy.
C ACHÉ 23 8. A reverse-shot, in medium close-up, of the boy advancing towards young Georges. 9. A reverse-shot of young Georges, backing up against the wall. 10. A reverse point of view of the blood-spattered boy, outlined against the exterior, his face twisted, his arms raising the axe above him. As he goes to bring it down we 11. Cut, once again, this time to a panicked adult Georges waking in bed, sweating and breathing heavily. This sequence offers an accomplished demonstration of classic suspense technique, using fast-paced montage to evoke a sense of menace and of spatial continuity. Although at no point do the two characters appear in the same shot, it makes perfect sense to us, watching the forty-six-second sequence, that the younger Georges is being threatened by the boy with the axe, and even within such a short time frame our sympathies are aroused. Inserted as it is here, it calls to mind a very similar interlude in Haneke s earlier Code Unknown (2000), which sees a toddler about to fall from a balcony. In that case, the event is revealed to be a scene from a film, in which one of Code Unknown s characters, an actress (played once again by Juliette Binoche), is appearing. In this instance, however, the image s status is much more uncertain. Its narrative framing between Georges saying his goodnights and Georges waking up implies that it is a dream. Yet we have already seen this bloodied little boy in an earlier insert, one that had no such narrative motivation. And matters are further complicated when we later learn that, while no such event actually took place, the young Georges had created a fiction which proceeded along these exact lines for the benefit of his parents. This may be as much the image of a fabrication as of a dream. But these are not the only instances of classical suspense technique in Caché. Haneke frequently draws on point of view and montage during moments of revelation or confrontation to heighten tension. During the dinner party, as the characters conduct a conversation about the marital breakdown of some mutual
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28 BFI FILM CLASSICS acquaintances, the benign banality of the evening is ruptured by a buzzing doorbell. A cut sees Georges opening the front door and the camera tracks to show him opening the wire gates that separate their house from the street, before two point-of-view shots reveal to us that the street, on either side, is empty. Any sense of relief is splintered, however, as Georges re-enters the house and, upon shutting the door, discovers a plastic bag jammed into it. There is a point-of-view shot of its contents: another tape and a drawing of a Editing is used to create suspense as Georges responds to an unexpected knock at the door
C ACHÉ 29 bloody chicken. He stuffs them into a jacket pocket, insisting, as another cut takes us back to the dining room, that there was nothing and no-one there. The argument that ensues Anne accusing her husband of dissimulating before revealing their secret to the room, Georges refusing to discuss it, the guests attempting to smooth things over by complimenting the dessert tightens the screws further by using a series of shot/counter-shot reversals. It is only when Georges capitulates (exclaiming, I have nothing to hide ) and discovers, to his
30 BFI FILM CLASSICS and our surprise, that the footage is not of the house in which he currently resides, but rather the one in which he grew up, that any catharsis is reached. Yet in this case it is riven through with confusion, since this tape breaks the established pattern set by the preceding ones. Similar editing conventions, in which point of view plays a structuring role, can be discerned when Georges collects his son Pierrot from school and the latter presents him with the latest in a series of ominous postcards; and, crucially, when Georges first confronts Majid in his apartment, a stark contrast with the filmed footage of the event which Anne later watches, as we will discuss in due course. Haneke refrains from taking his use of montage to the extremes that characterise both versions of Funny Games, in which intercutting is put to heart-pounding use during a sequence in which a small child attempts to evade his captors. However, it is worth noting that the film-maker extends the contrapuntal strategy that structures the dinner party scene whereby he contrasts seemingly inconsequential events or conversations with more significant ones to the film s structure as a whole. The most striking of such juxtapositions involve Pierrot s hobby of swimming: three times we see him at the pool, and these scenes always follow a moment of high tension. The first time this occurs, we might be tempted to consider the unseen swimming coach as a sinister figure, his lurking presence outside the frame lending him an ominous quality. But as other suspects present themselves, later scenes of Pierrot at the pool lose any implication of narrative significance and so critics have, for the most part, either ignored them completely or read them as having metaphorical value. 12 Maybe this is indeed the case, but they also serve as lulls, or spacers, slowing the trajectory of the whodunit storyline and in so doing creating a frustrating pause in which suspense can either disperse or tighten. Alfred Hitchcock s admonition that drama is nothing if not life with the dull bits cut out springs to mind here: for, in Caché, what Haneke offers us is precisely drama with the dull bits intact indeed,
C ACHÉ 31 he even puts them to use as a series of possible red herrings. Our ardent desire to piece together the mystery of who is sending the tapes leaves no scene exempt from scrutiny. What are we to make of an incident in which Georges is nearly run down by a cyclist? The fact that the man on the bike is black raises the spectre of racism, but the scene s place in the film seems more a contribution to the ongoing climate of fear and hostility. Both men are quick are to lay the blame for the near-miss squarely on the shoulders of the other, and as the yelling match that ensues reaches a level of near-hysteria, it is clear that Georges is feeling the pressure of the videotapes and the drawings, leading us to wonder what further erratic behaviour they might give rise to. As each man hastens to see the other as the guilty party in order to disavow any responsibility they themselves might have, it is only Anne who intervenes with a measure of temperance the young man was careless, but so was Georges. But if this incident suggests that Anne might serve as a moral compass for spectators, then how do we interpret the series of interspersed scenes suggesting that Anne has a very close relationship with her colleague, Pierre (Daniel Duval)? That these scenes never go so far as to show Anne and Pierre in compromising positions but rather place them in slightly too close physical proximity, at perfect ease with one another, is testament to the Haneke s directorial skill. There is just enough closeness between the pair to render the idea of an affair neither implausible nor self-evident. And the couple are accorded just enough scenes within the first half of the film s running time that their significance is uncertain. In fact, close attention to the short sequence which sees Pierre comforting Anne in a coffee shop reveals a number of disorientating signifiers: the shot is once again static, but is a close-up, so that this couldn t be could it? a piece of taped footage. Since it never appears again we may assume not. There is also the matter of the young white man positioned in the background, who throughout the conversation shoots furtive sidelong glances at Anne. Is this a random stranger whose attention
32 BFI FILM CLASSICS has been attracted by Anne s public emotional outburst? Or a far more sinister figure? In the classic suspense thriller it is often these background characters who move into the foreground as the film draws closer to its denouement. In Caché s second half, however, it is Georges and Anne s son Pierrot who emerges as a surprise suspect, his mysterious, hostile behaviour offering another road down which we might traipse in search of a culprit. When he accuses his mother of an affair with Being watched from behind
C ACHÉ 33 Pierre, the earlier scene featuring the pair is suddenly reframed, as the possibility arises that it may have been Pierrot s perspective we were somehow sharing either at the moment of filming or viewing, via the camera s lens or through the television screen. And yet we cannot know for sure which if any of these possibilities applies here. If Caché shows Haneke putting his own distinct spin on Hitchcockian suspense strategies, his most radical departure from the master s dictates lies at the heart of the film s impact. For Hitchcock, the essence of the thriller was that to get real suspense you must let the audience have information. 13 Thus the audience must know, for example, that a bomb is hidden in the child s parcel but the child himself must not. Yet the audience of Caché knows nothing until it is revealed to us by the characters themselves; and even then we can t be sure that it is the truth. In fact, Haneke s insertion of the flashbacks to Georges s lies most strongly references the now-notorious false flashback featured in Hitchcock s 1950 film Stage Door, which hoodwinked spectators by flaunting Hitchcock s own filmic conventions. In this respect, it is worth looking briefly at the character of Georges himself. Frequently clad in a beige trench coat, there is something noirish about Georges s appearance as he moves down the long, dimly lit corridors of Majid s apartment block, or surreptitiously enters the shadowy space of the Laurents entrance hall. Positioned at ground level, the cloakroom is a sort of Danteesque space between the dark streets of the external world and the upper levels of domestic interiors. An indeterminate space, it is resistant to any social clues, and therefore one of the few places in the film that seems impervious to the politics of the registration of the image. The iconography of the noir is cued in by the appearance of yet another tape. This one is taken from the point of view of a car speeding down a street in a working-class area. The driver is not shown. We then cut to an empty corridor in what appears to be a run-down apartment block, down which the camera plunges, until
34 BFI FILM CLASSICS finally it arrives at a door. Believing this video might lead them to the very source of the tapes, and aware that the police will not help them, Georges and Anne actively turn detective, playing and replaying the video, decoding the geography of the area in order to track down Georges s suspect (although the existence of this suspect is, at the time, unknown to Anne). Georges then pays his first visit to this address, where he finds Majid. As he stalks down the corridor, his point of view matches that of the unseen cameraman. His trench coat flaps about him as he angrily plays the tough guy with Majid, warning him to stay away from his family. After the encounter with the mysterious man from his past he gulps a coffee in a run-down café in much the same way as Bogart might have downed a whisky in a seedy bar. Rather than tell his wife about the meeting, however, he calls her from a phone box and tells her that no-one was home. Later, after witnessing Majid s suicide, he deliberately shrouds himself in the darkness of his bedroom for a climactic confrontation with Anne, snapping at her to shut off the lights when she suddenly throws the room into bright exposure. Sitting by the window, Georges is almost invisible in the unlit room, the only light a beam thrown from street, the scene set up Georges s resemblance to a noir detective
C ACHÉ 35 in classic chiaroscuro. As he admits to Anne that a series of childhood lies that Georges told had resulted in Majid being banished from the home they shared, he literally refuses to face up to his actions. Even when finally throwing light on his past with his wife, he himself remains in the shadows. For Georges, moreover, the enemy is everywhere. Following the arrival of the first tapes both he and Anne descend into an attitude of paranoia, secrecy and mistrust. Georges refuses to confide in his friends, his boss, his mother or even in the audience. We only learn of his suspicions and childhood actions along with his wife. And yet it is with Georges s perspective that the audience s experience of Caché s events is most frequently aligned. Lending credence to the view that the film is above all a psychological, rather than a social, portrait is the fact that Haneke s camera (that is, the camera belonging to Un film de Michael Haneke, rather than any diegetic camera), sticks closely to Georges, seemingly investigating him while ignoring other characters or else framing them objectively, rigidly we might say disinterestedly. Consider the manner in which Anne and Georges are first introduced to us, for example, in those opening scenes. Our very first glimpse of Anne is via the unmoving, distanced shot which we might assume belongs to the surveillance tape, as she leaves the house. The first time we see Georges, by contrast, it is in medium close-up, as he bursts onto the street in search of the camera s position. The camera pans to take in his movements. While Anne was observed but unvoiced, presented matter-of-factly, from his very first appearance Georges is given motivation and dialogue (which is foregrounded), and the camera too seems to spring into life with his appearance on-screen. This focus continues as we enter the Laurents apartment for the first time. As Anne and Georges move between the kitchen and the dining room, it is on Georges that the lens remains trained, trailing after him as he moves about. When he gets up from the table to fetch something, the camera bobs along with him; when Anne does the same thing, moments later, it remains with Georges while she moves into the off-screen space. The camera
36 BFI FILM CLASSICS thus seems to choose Georges. We do not share his subjective vision of life in the same way that we do in a film such as Gaspar Noe s Enter the Void (2009), in which the camera literally adopts the protagonist s point of view; nonetheless Caché s camera opts to show us Georges s world, his actions life, to a certain extent as Georges experiences them. Haneke pursues a similar strategy in The Piano Teacher (2001). Here, the film s protagonist, Erika Kohut (Isabelle Huppert), is Our first sight of Anne; and the first time we see Georges
C ACHÉ 37 present in every scene: the world apart from her ceases to exist. What is interesting about Caché, though, is that while Georges dominates the film s narrative, we are not exclusively offered his world, since we witness a number of scenes at which, according to the film s internal logic, Georges is not present. And careful attention to the nature of these scenes may be revealing. As far as I can ascertain, the scenes that we witness but Georges apparently does not can be divided into two categories. On the one hand there are moments in the lives of Georges s family: Pierrot s swimming class (although Georges could possibly be watching, unseen), Anne s book launch (during which she is on the phone to Georges, and so he is remotely present ) and her conversation with Pierre in the café. We also see Anne hosting Pierre and his wife; conducting a conversation with the mother of one of Pierrot s friends, and in confrontation with her son following his apparent disappearance. It is hard to know what significance to read into this exemption granted to Anne and, to a certain extent, Pierrot does it suggest their shared experience of Georges s world as part of his family? Is it an indicator of their relative innocence (since they are less mysterious than Majid and his son)? Or of their shared guilt? That these sequences are sometimes captured with a fixed camera, sometimes with a fluid one, troubles the issue further. On the other hand, however, there are the always static shots of events, apparently filmed by the anonymous cameraman, at which Georges was not present: the opening and closing sequences; the car journeys to his mother s house and Majid s apartment; the distressing sequence of Majid quietly weeping after Georges has taken his leave of him. A psychological reading of these sequences, one that would be consistent with the fact that Georges is, otherwise, our guide through the film s events, would suggest that he is in some way present for them too. Indeed, in the case of most of the examples mentioned above, he is present as a viewer. That is, we are revealed to be watching these sequences with Georges at one point or another, as the fixed image either follows, or gives way to, a framing shot of
38 BFI FILM CLASSICS Georges (and, usually, Anne) viewing the images on the television. But the obvious exception to this strategy is the film s final sequence which, although shot with a static camera, does not change status as we watch it, and so remains forever uncertain. Some critics have hypothesised that, much as the images of Majid and Georges as children can be viewed as memories or flashbacks (even false flashbacks), that is, images generated by Georges s mind, the tapes themselves can be understood as the products of Georges s subconscious. They thus make their case for reading the film as a whole as a psychological portrait, a study of one man s mind. And yet in this case, how do we account for the scenes in which Anne and Pierrot exist autonomously?