Caché

Is it possible to like or recommend a film when you’re not entirely sure how it ends exactly?

Because I enjoyed Michael Haneke’s ‘Cache’ quite a bit. There’s something so much more powerful for the audience when a director lets the actors and the gravity of the situation he places them in unfold in a careful, deliberate manner. At times funny, disturbing, and tragic, the story is gripping from its extended opening title sequence, holding a single frame on a quiet street scene for several long minutes, to its similarly patient final revealing shot.

Daniel Auteuil and Juliette Binoche are wonderful as a nearing middle-age married couple who become increasingly frustrated with one another as they try to figure how why they’ve been receiving strange postcards and videotapes from an anonymous though seemingly menacing source. They capture, in a very understated but convincing fashion, the way a loving couple can find equal parts comfort and irritation in one another in the face of threats from the outside world.

Sometimes a word like ‘understatement’ in a review can be a code word for ‘boring’ (‘visually stunning’ and ‘hypnotic’ being code words for ‘really fucking boring’) but here it's a compliment. There’s a wonderful scene (not giving anything away here) where Daneil Auteuil’s character visits his aging mother and they engage in pleasantries before she looks him in the eye and asks him to cut the crap and tell her what’s going on. The piercing, knowing look of a mother who always knows when her child is covering up and the evasive, nervous response of the grown up child is probably the most authentic and thus, for some reason, exhilarating exchange I’ve seen on film for some time.

I also don’t recall the last time I’ve been in a theatre and heard several hundred people simultaneously gasp in shock at a sudden, unexpected turn of event on the screen.

So really, the only downside was not really being sure about the story’s conclusion.

The joys of seeing a film in the beautiful Elgin theatre are sometimes overshadowed by the fact that they rarely, if ever, host post-screening Q & As. Had there been one, a simple, “so does this mean that x caused y?” and a confirmation or explanation from the director would have done wonders for me. I’ve since trekked over to IMDB and confirmed what I thought to be the case (or at least been comforted by the fact that others had similar interpretations) but would be interested in comparing notes with some of you all. Highly recommend.