Caché

Michael Haneke’s Caché is about white guilt, French division. You can tell early on that the mystery of the videotapes—à la Lost Highway—will never be solved, and that there’ll be no chance for Daniel Auteuil’s Georges to redeem himself. The tapes are just a ploy to strip him naked, to show that beneath the veneer of civilization—he hosts a show about books on public television, and his wife works in publishing—he’s a petty, pathetic man, still held accountable for a crime he committed at age six, a crime that he’ll never have the humility to fess up to. Haneke’s “objective” style has the same objectives as the videotapes. In The White Ribbon, set nearly a century ago, his dreamlike, black-and-white formalism captured how things might have felt; in Caché, he seems to be saying that this is how things are. Everybody—even refined literary types (the sort who’d go to see such a high-minded thriller)—is stained. It might have been more tolerable if Georges went through some semblance of a change, but Haneke makes it clear that, outside of his nightmares, Georges will never budge. To him, the mystery has been solved, even as it’s made abundantly clear to us that he’s latching onto a red herring—an improbable one at that. But the film is certainly gripping; you suffer on Georges’s behalf.