cache and juliette binoche and georges and algerian independence

In this 2005 award-winning film (Prize of the Ecumenical Jury at the 2005 Cannes Festival) director Michael Haneke has taken us into a subterranean exploration of our secret, hidden spaces and how we suppress knowledge of those spaces to our own detriment. As might be expected from the title of the movie ("Cache"--"Hidden"), we are never quite sure of everything that is happening in the film and whether the scene being portrayed is truly the unfolding of a narrative of events or is a "rewind" of a film sent to the main character by a childhood acquaintance whom the main character mistreated. Yet as the movie gradually unfolds, we are deposited right in the middle of a suspenseful drama which ratchets up our horror as we learn more and more of the truth of the characters.

Meeting the "Leads"

Georges (Daniel Auteuil) and his wife Anne (Juliette Binoche), live with their twelve year-old son Pierrot in a comfortable section of Paris. Georges has become a national celebrity of sorts, hosting a intellectually-oriented television discussion of literature and the arts. His fame, however, cannot protect him and his family from an ever-increasing assault of films and primitive drawings deposited at their house by a mysterious individual. Each of the films and drawings has an ominous dimension to it--blood spurting out of necks of stick figures or surveillance videos of their flat. As the number and bloodiness of the deliveries continue, Georges also receives an address, which he decides to visit. When he arrives at the apartment, he meets a swarthy and stocky short man whom we gradually learn was a servant, a few years older than Georges, at the chateau where Georges grew up more than 40 years previously.

The servant was of Algerian descent, and his parents were apparently killed in the 1961 drowning-massacre of hundreds of Algerians in Paris at the time of Algeria's quest for independence. After the child's parents died, Georges' family decided to adopt him, but Georges rebelled against the idea, and the child was sent away to an orphanage with no hope of receiving an education or any kind of suitiable training for life. This "deep background" becomes the occasion for the first series of "hidden" things to be presented. The former servant denies that he is responsiblee for the films, though it is patently obvious to Georges and the viewer that the short man is indeed rolling the films. And, more seriously, Georges denies that he is responsible in any way for the humiliation, limitation and ultimately the destruction of hope of the former servant. Rather than their meeting becoming an occasion for human understanding to develop, Georges, in his fear, threatens the former servant will all kinds of direful punishments if he doesn't cease harassing him or his family. The former servant, shorn of his dignity once more, can never come to ask the question that his son eventually will ask George--what does it feel like to be a person who utterly destroyed the life of another?

Other "Hidden" Things

But if the dynamics of the secret animosity between Georges and the former servant present the most obvious reason for the name of the film, we learn also that other characters are also keeping important things to themselves. Anne is bothered that Georges isn't confiding in her, and so she seeks out the counsel (and maybe the physical intimacy?) of a friend of the couple's. And Pierrot, rather than being a carefree youth, takes it all in and is shocked and humiliated by his mother's possible affair--but he feels he must keep this possible knowledge buried deep inside himself. Thus, every member of the central family is burdened with mysteries and hidden stories which, like the Tetragrammaton for Jews, are too sacred to be pronounced.

"Resolving" the Film

So as not to drop the "punchline(s)" of the movie, suffice it to say that secrets withheld only lead to alienation between people and even death. Haneke never explores why we tenaciously hold onto our secrets despite the fact that they limit and even kill us, but we see that the result of secrets undisclosed to loved ones creates interior chasms and emptiness that sends people into independent orbital paths around each other. In the words of one critic, Haneke skillfully portrays a man who is briliant when it comes to discussing ideas "but brainless when it comes to understaning himself."

Conclusion--Seeking Understanding

In contrast to Crash (reviewed here), Cache allows us to leave the theater with a question on our minds. What, indeed, am I scared to examine from my own past? What am I trying to suppress or, better said, what am I hiding from myself and others? In Georges' case, he desperately had to maintain the stranglehold on his past lest the truth come out, he be exposed and somehow he become humiliated. Better to re-humiliate the Algerian man, the former servant, than face up to the true consequences of actions done more than 40 years previously. Do we try to suppress stories of ourselves? We often hear people speak about "Truths to Live By" or some such thing; but we wonder, after thinking about Cache, if it is really lies or secrets that control the palpitations of our hearts. If Haneke's portrayal of people has any truth in it, however, it tells us that we maintain our secrets at a tremendous cost to ourselves and others. Keeping secrets makes us impatient and unfeeling, unable to probe our true selves, and gradually unable even to relate well to those close to us. But who can assure us that if the secrets come "out," that we will live any better? Might we lose everything? That is, might we lose not only our sense of control over our past but also our position in the present?

Cache stimulates these and other haunting questions. I am glad that the day after I saw it, I headed for a 7-day Caribbean cruise. A perfect setting for self-reflection.....(right)

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