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Fed up though we may be, it is of
course pie in the sky to imagine a corporate climate
in which serious confrontation with topical issues
could become a priority. Indeed, leaving aside recent
tinderboxes like Fahrenheit
9/11 or Million Dollar Baby, moviegoers
still get in line for March
of the Penguins rather than Iraq combat doc Occupation:
Dreamland, flock to Batman
Begins rather than…? Hereís where it gets
interesting. Critics have continually argued that in
lieu of genuine
“problem films” (that long-abandoned post-WWII
flurry of liberalism), Hollywood genres smuggle in
hot-button political ideas and controversies through
the trapdoor of allegory—hence the notion that,
for instance, sci-fi charades in War
of the Worlds conceal
an otherwise unsanctioned message about imperialism.
This sort of insight depends on an understanding of
ideology as fraught with contradiction, and of genre
as a risk-friendly receptacle, but it is at best peripheral
to the clamor for “relevance.” Yet even
assuming a rough consensus on what it means to produce
cogent social dramas, is there an extant model of popular
narrative cinema offering unvarnished perspectives
on divisive themes?
A logical place to start is the European art film, celebrated at least since
the Fifties for its ostensibly deeper engagement with the twin scourges of alienation
and neocolonialism. Among other beacons of resistance, pantheon directors Godard,
Fassbinder, Antonioni, and Makavejev provided valuable diagnoses of historically
specific ills. Unfortunately, that tradition’s pulse-taking cachet has faded,
dulled by exercises like Lars von Trier’s potted political cartoons and preoccupied
of late with the burdens of multiculturalism—snooze material for a nation built
on immigration and slavery. At the risk of echoing jingoistic cant, Americans
exist in a post-9/11 universe, while advanced filmmaking in Donald Rumsfeld’s
“Old Europe” often appears parochial or, as he delicately put it, “out
of step” with
the rough beasts that populate our waking nightmares.
Who then possesses a creative sensibility befitting our contemporary hash of
dread, disgust, and rage? Since his first theatrical feature in 1989, The
Seventh Continent, German-born Michael Haneke has dispensed post-9/11 visions
of violent, benumbed swatches of middle-class society on the brink of dissolution.
Four years and numerous debacles after the onset of our apocalyptic era, it is
increasingly clear that in our heads—as, for the most part, comfortable, educated,
anxious urbanites who also constitute the prime audience for Euro art cinema—we
inhabit the same unremittingly bleak, paranoid landscape within which Haneke
conducts his nasty business. It is a place we would call home only under duress.
Hidden (Caché), his latest and arguably most accomplished provocation,
revolves around central characters and a plot predicament that—despite being
set in an unnamed French city—feel terrifyingly familiar. That’s the operative
word, terrifying. Haneke specializes in what Alexander Horwath labels “boundary
transgression” narratives,
in which upscale professionals—cushioned from harsh realities by racial and class
privilege, as well as by an illusion of control derived from televised news programming—become
suddenly vulnerable to hostile outsiders or, alternatively, to subversive acts
from within the family circle, frequently committed by children.
Like the repellently purgative Funny Games (97), Hidden mines
an especially timely fable of domestic insecurity: home invasion as the trigger
for personal/familial catastrophe. In this case, a pair of seemingly self-satisfied
bourgeois bohemians—he hosts a Charlie Rose–type TV literary forum, she’s
a book editor—
receive a series of unsettling videotapes, at first just surveillance footage
of the facade of their luxurious townhouse, accompanied soon after by crudely
menacing drawings. As husband Georges (Daniel Auteuil) tries to investigate the
source of these threats, his relationships with wife Anne (Juliette Binoche)
and preteen son Pierrot (Lester Makedonsky) unravel, in part due to a long-sup-
pressed secret from Georges’s childhood that oozes to the surface.
To make matters worse, this revelation—the sketchy betrayal of a young
Algerian friend adopted by Georgesís farm-owning parents after an infamous 1961
police massacre of anti-colonial protesters—is matched in disorienting
impact by emerging betrayals, sexual and otherwise, perpetrated by Anne and Pierrot.
As usual, Haneke decks out inhospitable family spaces in glinting glass and metallic
panels, omnipresent TV screens and rows of videotapes, doorways, and other architectural
elements that simultaneously enforce separation and allow for unwanted encroachment.
He surveys the disjointed, inconclusive action through a clinical grid of long
takes, slow fades, and frontal master shots. Scenes of Georges’s dreams disrupt
Hidden’s coolly distanced fabric with an anomalous jolt of subjectivity.
In the end, despite an almost throwaway clue, the mystery of who set the fuse
that atomizes the family, and why, remains unsolved. As in previous films, the
directorís manipulation
of genre expectations—a twisting of formula that never stoops to parody or quotation—redirects
the hermeneutic energies of the thriller inward toward the protagonistís flimsy
identity and outward to his enveloping social context. The closest analogy would
be classic film noir—say, Act of Violence or In
a Lonely Place—mediated
by the deceptions of the Bush administration instead of the Cold War.
In a move reminiscent of several Haneke films in which a scene is replayed on
video, it pays to quickly rewind his career leading up to Hidden. The
son of professional actors, he studied philosophy at the University of Vienna,
and wrote and directed plays before logging a 15-year stint in commercial television,
a medium repeatedly excoriated in his features as a desensitizing purveyor of
violence. The opening chapter in his “trilogy of emotional glaciation,” The
Seventh Continent, is loosely based on a real case, a common source for
Haneke’s deadpan tabloid scripts. Understated to a fault, the film hovers over
the silences and miscommunications in a household of bourgeois automatons who
calmly decide to commit suicide, although not before smashing their worldly possessions
to bits and flushing wads of money down the toilet. In Benny’s Video (92),
a pampered teenage boy obsessed with footage he shot of a hog being killed with
a stun gun on his parents’ weekend farm invites a disaffected girl to the family
apartment, then kills her with the purloined weapon, only to have pragmatic Dad
cover up the crime. 71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance (94) exudes more urban
anomie and senseless murder, this time through a stark calculus of four separate
stories of unfulfilled need, shards of which overlap during a shooting spree
in a bank.
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