Cache (Dir. Micheal Haneke)

SPOILER WARNING.

Cache is commentary on paranoia. Georges and Anne Laurent learn than they are being watched with a hidden camera. Their paranoia is subtly juxtaposed with a more global paranoia as we see and hear the television news reporting on the global war on terrorism. The personal is necessarily intertwined with the political as the 1961 massacre of Algerians comes into the plot. And paranoia is intertwined with race and ethnicity.

Cache is a film that plays on and subverts two fundamental human desires: the desire to know and the desire to see. Forgive me here, but I’m going to use annoying film theory terms now. Haneke reflexively calls attention and subverts the pleasures of scopophelia (looking) and epistophelia (knowledge). In most traditional films, these pleasures are satisfied through conventions of filmmaking–establishing shots, point-of-view shots etc–that align our gaze with that of the characters. When our gaze is not aligned with a character, it is placed in the omniscient privileged position of an all-knowing observer. In Cache, however, what we see is constantly being called into question. We think we are seeing one thing only to later learn that we had seen something else entirely. Take the opening scene for example. A long shot of a house that first appears to be an establishing shot cuts to a scene of a couple watching the very same footage that we had just seen. We learn that the characters are being watched with a hidden camera at the precise moment they do in the film’s narrative. The details of how Georges betrayed Majib, even as they become clarified, still remain sketchy at the film’s conclusion. Just as the viewer’s knowledge is incomplete, so are the characters’. When Anne scolds Georges for not telling her who he suspected was watching them, we see the effect of surveillance. Tensions rise as the couple knows they are being watched. But there is something else going on. Anne is frustrated by her incomplete knowledge, her inability to know the truth that her husband is keeping from her.

In Cache, the long shots are extreme. In some instances, these long establishing shots indicate the actual surveillance camera. But at other times, Haneke uses these shots to imitate the constant surveillance in a networked society. This stylistic choice forces the viewer to question who is doing the looking at the same time forcing the viewer into the role of voyeur as s/he scans the screen for important clues into the plot. But this voyeuristic position is not a pleasurable one (like that achieved by Reality TV). Voyeurism always requires a distance between the looker and the looked at. But Haneke uses distance as a tactic to confuse the viewer, not aimed at giving the spectator a sense of unmediated access to the truth. Take the final scene. When I first watched it, I knew that the location was Pierrot’s school and that Anne was there to pick him up so that’s what I was looking for. At one point, we see Anne’s back in the center of the frame. So naturally, my eye was drawn there. What I failed to notice was Pierrot and Majib’s son chatting in the side of the frame. (I learned this from reading Robert Ebert’s review of the film!) Here, we see the inability of an image to convey reality. Not only did my vision fail me, but after seeing the pair converse, my previous understanding of the film was called into question. Did they know each other before? Or was this the first time they were meeting? What was Hajib’s son telling Pierrot?

Another looming question remains unanswered: why surveillance? Whether or not the person responsible for the videos was Hajib, his son, or someone else, why did he choose the medium of video? Clearly the desired effect was the kind of paranoia mentioned above. And if the culprit was Hajib, the constant yet un-locatable eye of the camera on the Laurent’s might represent a comment on his own feeling of invisibility and powerlessness. Throughout the film, it was constantly re-iterated that the police would not act until their was physical danger. The tapes on their own were not enough. The hidden camera did not harm the Laurent’s physically, it did not restrict their freedom or action in any tangible way. Yet, the psychological awareness is a kind of force that is perhaps incipient to control.

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