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Caché: Near Perfect Storyelling Gets Undermined by Pretentious Political Allegory

Daniel Aueteuil and Juliette Binoche set out on a gripping, incisive, menacing journey towards deep emotional truth - only to come up empty handed with cheap sociopolitical posturing.

Caché comes out of the gate as a near-perfect psychological thriller and then takes a huge misstep with an oversimplified political allegory that not only has nothing to do with the larger dramatic set-up but further robs the movie of basic story logic. It all begins when unhappy couple Georges (Daniel Aueteuil) and Anne (Juliette Binoche) receives a series of mysterious, menacing surveillance videos on its doorstep - though Georges initially feigns complete ignorance as to what the tapes might mean, we quickly discover his deeper suspicion that the stalking is somehow related to an unnamed unforgivable act he committed as a child. It’s a gripping, juicy dramatic set-up: the deeper that Georges goes toward uncovering the source of the videos, the greater the risk that he must at last confront a part of himself that he has spent a lifetime trying to forget.

The movie does a great job of showing Georges’ latent guilt and overall repression has overtaken his adult life – he’s a prideful, defensive control freak whose lack of a connected emotional life has driven alienated Anne into the illusory comfort of an extramarital wife. That’s the beauty of this movie – the menacing mystery becomes a larger-than-life mirror for the more garden-variety mistrust and paranoia that rules everyday lives. Even better, Cache possesses the psychological incisiveness to show that these issues that plague us stem from early childhood trauma, that we’re all simply acting out the same formative, unconscious story in every facet of our lives, that these unresolved inner demons can cause us to suffer a figurative – or, in this case, literal – death over the course of our year, that no matter how much we might construct the outward façade of a normal life, our the deepest recesses of our emotional/spiritual resistance will still take its silent toll. As viewers, we can hardly wait to discover the gruesome secret gnawing at Georges’ every waking (and non-waking) moment, we can hardly wait to see his carefully maintained façade crack open to reveal as much horrifying as it is deeply truthful.

And this is precisely the point where Caché loses the plot. Rather than give us a secret worthy of a lifelong guilt complex, we instead get a hackneyed metaphor for the French/Algerian conflict that renders the movie null and void. The story goes something like this: six year-old Georges resented his parents’ decision to adopt the orphan of their recently-slaughtered Algerian servants and made up a series of lies about his character that ultimately got the boy sent to an orphanage; the movie essentially speculates that had Majid been able to stay with Georges’ family he would have turned out perfectly, but because he was sent to the orphanage he was essentially exiled to a life of social discrimination and limited opportunities for professional advancement. Now, all these years later, for reasons unexplained, Majid’s devoted son (Walid Afkir) has leveraged a launched an elaborate scheme to avenge the legacy of poverty that Georges unwittingly caused his family.

There is a lot of reasons why this “secret” doesn’t work in the larger world of Caché. First off, it really doesn’t seem that excessively cruel – sure, it’s not young Georges’ finest hour but it feels more than somewhat unreasonable/understandable that a six year-old boy, one largely unaware of the world beyond the sheltered scope of his rural estate, would be instantly jealous of a new addition to the family and therefore impulsively act out. At the end of the day, Georges certainly seems as if he had been a spoiled, petulant kid – but this is hardly something like Atonement where the guilty party made a conscious choice to condemn someone to a torturously cruel fate, where the guilty party acted out of pure spite and with full awareness of the possible consequences of her actions. At the end of the day, Georges’ “crime” is no more and no less than the result of basic developmental possessiveness of his parents – hardly the embodiment of willing, conscious, destructive selfishness.

Meanwhile, Majid’s life really doesn’t seem all that bad as a result of his trip to the orphanage: sure, he’s not living in the lap of luxury but he’s got a roof over his head, he’s got a loving son who looks after his overall welfare, he’s got a sensitive disposition – even if we are to boy the far-fetched idea that Majid’s being an orphan condemned him to a life of modest means, this guy isn’t exactly searching the gutter for scraps or desperately fighting for basic survival. There’s certainly not enough dramatic suffering to justify or explain why this man would elect to suddenly commit suicide. Likewise, there is very little understanding why Majid’s son would compelled to launch a terrorizing campaign now of all times. What has Majid’s son been doing previous to now? What prompted him to seek out vigilante justice now? In other words, the movie’s misguided political undercurrents drown the whole thing in distinct dramatic vagueness.

And the worst part of all this is that the movie is in no way about the French/Algerian conflict. It’s not even about Parisian society at large. No, it’s about a very specific white, upper-class family – it’s strained interpersonal relationships, its marital tension, its emotional repression. Nowhere in this set-up do we even a hint of the surrounding sociopolitical climate. Truly, Caché is a movie that could take place anytime or anywhere given the distinct lack of external, topical influence on our main characters. What happens, then, is that the intended commentary on the Algerian plight sneaks into the movie from the sidelines in the most heavy-handed, haphazard ways – Geroges and Anne have a domestic squabble while news footage about Algerian refugees plays in the background like a big anvil of pretentious symbolism; we have vaguely-defined characters like Majid and his son who seem less like real people with clear lives or clear agendas and more like paper-thin stand-in’s for the hollow political commentary.

If writer/director Michael Haneke wanted to make a movie about the French/Algerian conflict, then he should have just made a movie that’s actually about the French/Algerian conflict – pick a specific, relevant moment in time to dramatize the tension, stack the deck with white characters that possess a meaningful relationship with respect to the Algerian community, stack the deck with Algerians that embody the plight of the refugee and then grow the dramatic balls to truly go there. But don’t gives us a white, bourgeoisie psychodrama and then try to sell it as sociopolitical commentary about an issue that has just about no bearing on the plot. It’s pretentious, it’s ridiculous – and, most importantly, it voids the movie of organic, believable characters that act out a clearly established MO or agenda.

Directed by: Michael Haneke
Written by: Michael Haneke
Starring: Daniel Aueteuil, Juliette Binoche

July 29, 2009