A street scene where nothing really happens goes on far longer than it's supposed to. Or does it? Is it prolonged "dead time"? Did the picture freeze up? It develops that the street scene is a videotape being watched by two of the main protagonists of "Caché", themselves being watched by an unknown observer who keeps leaving surveillance videos at their doorstep. The viewer's point of view becomes the characters' point of view which turns out to be, in turn, the unknown observer's point of view. Thus the implied complicity among the audience/viewers, the voyeur/observer and the observed subject, is rendered explicit. Or is that too pat and simple and not relating to anything at all?
We find out further that the subject of this surveillance is a TV talk show host, someone who is comfortable about being watched by millions but finds palpable menace in the seemingly ordinary footage of his everyday existence. Do the mundane and the banal take on the character of a threat once close attention and interest are vested in them?
The film's rhythm seems uneven. Cuts jump with a jarring suddenness from one scene to another, not seeming to follow the implied narrative. Did the editor insert scenes in the wrong places? Did outtakes somehow jump of their own volition off the cutting room floor and insinuated themselves into the final cut? Some scenes seem to "happen" without anything "happening" in them. But that is not a novel concept, of course: Do the scenes bear a closer look? Will a dead body materialize among the jumble of foliage in a corner if we freeze the picture and blow it up?(Huuuwwiiinngg! Antonioni alert!)
The film's director, Michael Haneke, would not disclose anything other than that it is a morality tale, how one deals w/ one's guilt, or how one's guilt is affected (or not) if both parties are culpable. He obviously revels in the film's ambiguous elements, particularly the film's seemingly unresolved conclusion. "There are 1000 truths", he says in an interview featured in the DVD, echoing the iconic Kurosawa film, "Rashomon", where each character had his/her own "truthful" version of an incident. The supposedly subjective quality of "the truth" is, again, not a novel concept.
There was another movie I saw long ago, a psychological drama where a character talks about the three kinds of secrets: The ones we don't tell other people, the ones we don't tell ourselves and finally, the third secret is the truth. Maybe that's the secret the director was proposing with this film, in his jagged and elliptical two-hour way. Surely this will be the subject of discussions among cineastes for some time; it may even become a classic(!).
But what if this movie was a joke tossed in the general direction of pretentious intellectuals? Was it a lark, a spree, was it very clear to see? Do you see a pair of dancing elephants in the ink blot? Or maybe this: It's a Hitchcockian thriller with a socio-political subtext fed by an undercurrent of guilt, a commentary on a national psyche's paranoia induced by past misdeeds. Or finally, to quote Hitchcock himself, this: "It's only a moooooovie!"
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