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Caché

  
 
Mistoffelees
19:48 / 27.02.06
This movie had some good word of mouth in the last weeks, so I saw it today and it´s wonderful.

A well off french couple gets anonymous video tapes. The tapes show their home for two hours. The content of the tapes change, and as they get creepy drawings, too, the husband suspects someone. The situation gets more and more out of control, and the tension is becoming very palpable.

The movie works on many different levels, and you can suspect anybody in the movie of hidden motifs. It´s the kind of movie one should see again, but I don´t know if I´ll do that anytime soon.

There are some very crucial scenes in this movie, so it might be best to have SPOILER warnings, or that people read the thread only after watching the movie.
 
 
nimue
14:54 / 06.04.06
haneke is one of my favorite directors, and i thought this film represented a real maturation of his style. i left the theatre chilled to the bone and seriously could not warm up for an hour afterwards.

what i loved so much about this film is how it veers from perspective to perspective, from real to reel... how, from the opening long take, you know you're dealing with an unstable narrator-- that narrator being the camera.

i feel that his films tend to point towards audience culpability, particularly in terms of the cycle of creating and consuming violence that has taken over hollywood. i'm interested to know if anyone else has thoughts on this. i think this was particularly evident in the piano teacher and time of the wolf.
 
 
Tabitha Tickletooth
09:02 / 13.04.06
Very late to this, I'm afraid - just saw it last night and thought it compelling viewing. Although it is only the next day, I'm struck by how much it has stayed with me - so that I find in spare moments I am turning over in my mind what I thought of different characters and motivations.

Possibly spoilerish?

The question I keep asking myself, that really exercises my mind, is how much did Georges *truly* acknowledge what he had done to Majid. It is one thing to protest your innocence to others when you are attacked or perceive yourself as attacked - as when he speaks with his partner or Majid's son - and to imply that Majid's was an over-reaction. But did Georges really believe that.

I don't think there is an 'answer' to this in the film - it's deliberately unclear. FWIW I think he both knows and refuses to see (if that makes sense). He is awash with race and class prejudice yet clearly living by a modern 'liberal' ethos. (I know that's a very reductive statement, but I hope in this context it is useful.)

Georges sense of his own culpability/responsibility/guilt - not whether justice is done, not an external thing but whether *he himself* understands his actions and the full consequence of his actions - really troubles me. What an excellent film!
 
 
CameronStewart
01:35 / 02.06.06
BUMP!

I just finished watching this and have a question about the closing minutes of the film - the final shot is of a group of students gathered outside the school, and although it's VERY subtle, among them I'm sure we see Pierrot in friendly (?) conversation with Majid's son. They're off to the side of the frame, they blend in with the rest of the people in the shot, but I'm sure it's them. They chat for a minute, Pierrot goes off to stand with his friends and Majid's son walks away. Roll credits.

So forgive me if I'm being dense, but what's that about??
 
 
Whisky Priestess
08:28 / 02.06.06
I totally didn't get that. I watched and watched and thought by the end, when I didn't see anything or anyone I recognised, that it was about the anxiety of waiting at the school gates until all the kids had gone and realising your child wasn't there, or ever going to be (i.e. the parents' fear of Pierrot's being kidnapped or harmed).

But my mate said it was an obvious reference to the value of the education that Georges denied Majid. Hmm.
 
 
nimue
12:27 / 02.06.06
whiskey & cameron, i think you're both right! because i am a hopeful person, my personal preference is for the interaction between pierrot & majid's son-- because it's an overcoming of the sins of the father, and a sign that maybe, someday, our children will get past this horrible network of atrocity in which the rest of us have been so entrenched. i also wonder if it points to the possibility of majid's son & pierrot having conspired together to create the tapes. because it's a static shot like the videos received by the family, i also wonder if it points to reminding us that we are watching a film-- that everything we've seen so far has been manipulated in some way. the plain fact that the ending is confusing and can be taken many different ways shows us that experience and memory are like that, too. we miss what goes on in the fringes, or the center of the frame, and our eyes are called only towards what the manipulator chooses. in a shot like this, however, where nothing is given foreground preference, we're allowed to gaze and interpret.
 
 
Mistoffelees
05:24 / 07.06.06
I´ve read the following idea:

The talk between Majid and Pierrot takes place, before everything happens. The time, when Pierrot s gone and his parents worry, he meets with Majid to talk about their plans. Pierrot knows, that his mother has (had?) an affair with the guy, that tells the joke at the dinner table [rewatch the scene, where his mother talks to him in his room]. With his plan, he wants to get back at his parents.

The messages to Pierrot´s father were their idea. They wanted the two fathers to meet again and come clear about their past.

They probably didn´t expect things to escalate the way they did.
 
 
Psych Safeling
20:09 / 12.09.06
Just saw this today. Amazing film. I think Georges fails to acknowledge his culpability for the crime against Majid, but his (subconscious?) awareness of it is evident both in his aggressive defensiveness (is there a more elegant way of putting that?), particularly marked in the interchanges with Majid and his son, the politest characters in the film, and in the possibility that Georges himself made the tapes. I doubt there is supposed to be a neat conclusion about who sent the tapes, and as such I think an examination of each protagonist's motives is illuminatory and meaningful. Since the set of potential tape-makers is so small in terms of the microcosm of the direct story, (though it is presumably Hanneke himself in the allegorical thread i.e. he is revealing the oppressors to themselves) I think we are implicitly forced to consider Georges as auteur by the cinematic setup which encourages us to search for one conclusive perpetrator.

Browsing the internet I saw a lot about Haneke's disdain for his audience - his subversion and exposure of the 'liberal', middle-class bourgeoisie was pervasive, and there was certainly a lot about the film that seemed contrived to make us uncomfortable and encourage reflexive analysis.

I would highly recommend reading Chiranjit Goswami's review on www.notcoming.com. I certainly found it very illuminating and would post more were it not for fear of reductive plagiarism.
 
 
miss wonderstarr
21:24 / 12.09.06
Surely the scene with the two sons doesn't have to be a flashback to events before the narrative proper, for that idea to work... if they cooked up the scheme themselves, there's no reason at all why they wouldn't meet afterwards as well. I don't see why we would have to assume they met once, set events in motion and never met again.
 
 
Psych Safeling
20:27 / 13.09.06
I wonder if the Pierrot's-suspicion-of-affair bit suggests that he is the cameraman? The scene where Pierre was being a bit... inappropriate? towards Anne was shot IIRC in the style of the hidden camera footage, and would explain where Pierrot got the idea from, which is otherwise unexplained? Again, I don't think that's an answer, because I don't think the point of the film is a neatly resolved whodunnit, but it may be a clue to explore why we think Pierrot could have had something to do with it.

I read the meeting on the steps as a future hope for racial integration and oppression atonement, rather than any deep intrigue, though.
 
 
Krug
08:01 / 11.08.07
Interesting discussion. Haneke quickly became my favourite filmmaker before Cache came out and I'll try to recall what I can about the film. I think that if the question "Who sent the tapes?" must have an answer, then the best answer is probably Haneke himself. It is quite clear early in the film throughout the film that a number of the tapes could not have, realistically, been made by anyone *in* the film. and the only person who actually could be standing in those places and be undetected (behind the fourth wall presumably) is the director himself (and the crew I suppose).

The problem I think with trying to find a different culprit is (Majid or his son being likely suspects for some) that it tends to shift the very colonial guilt that the film is about, to its victims (Algerians). Haneke creates that little link of complicity between personal and colonial guilt with Majid's own role in history and I think the question of who sent the tapes is just a Macguffin to draw the viewer into the film to consider the bigger issues that Haneke wants us to talk about. He does something similar in Funny Games where ultimately, the entire business, the plot, with the family is not just what the film is about. Yes it certainly creates the space for the discussion to be had but I feel one has to wonder about other things in Cache rather than "who really sent the tapes? was it..."

The ending, I felt at the time, was about "interracial" (god i despise this word) dialogue and the possibility of acknowledgment of racial and class privilege. I wasn't too optimistic about that to be honest. A friend who saw it last week pointed out to me that one can almost mark out the racial privilege in the construction of the scene. I have to see it again to verify that reading but it seemed to run with how I saw the film.


/The question I keep asking myself, that really exercises my mind, is how much did Georges *truly* acknowledge what he had done to Majid. It is one thing to protest your innocence to others when you are attacked or perceive yourself as attacked - as when he speaks with his partner or Majid's son - and to imply that Majid's was an over-reaction. But did Georges really believe that.

I don't think there is an 'answer' to this in the film - it's deliberately unclear./

I know this is a cheap answer but I feel it is right one.

Not enough. His acknowledgment is just insufficient.

I think I left the film feeling that Georges could not see his own privilege, his moral guilty/responsibility and there was very little hope about his outlook changing.


I feel like creating a Haneke thread.
 
  
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