The opening shot of Michael Haneke's Caché shows the facade of a townhouse on a side street in Paris. As the credits roll, ordinary events take place on the street. Then we discover that this footage is a video, and that it is being watched by Anne and Georges Laurent (Juliette Binoche and Daniel Auteuil). It is their house. They have absolutely no idea who took the video, or why it was sent to them.
So opens a perplexing and disturbing film of great effect, showing how comfortable lives are disrupted by the simple fact that someone is watching. Georges is the host of a TV program about books; yes, in France they have shows where intellectuals argue about books, and an audience that actually watches them. Georges and Anne live in their book-lined house with their son Pierrot Laurent (Lester Makedonsky), a teenager who is sulky and distracted in the way that teenagers can be when they have little to complain about except their discontent.
Another video arrives, showing the farmhouse where Georges and his family lived when he was a child. All the videos they receive will have the same style: A camera at some distance, simply looking. Many of the shots in the film itself are set up and filmed in the same way, so that Caché could be watching itself just as the videos watch the Laurents. No comment is made in the videos through camera position, movement, editing -- or perhaps there is the same comment all the time: Someone wants them to know that they are being watched. … |
