#20 — Cache (Michael Haneke, 2005)
Michael Haneke pulls no punches. The German-born and Austrian-raised director believe that films should have missions, usually to challenge and provoke. Watching his films gives the strong sense that he’d much rather leave an audience rattled than entertained. He favors stories structured around the was human misery can mount. Haneke doesn;t cave in, offering the audience a catharsis or some other form of emotional release. He sees his premise through to the bitter end, an ending shaped by a dim view of the capacity for generosity, forgiveness or grace, whether that ending is a thunderclap of misery or an ambiguity that is potentially even more wounding.

There are tremendous risks to this approach, most notably that the filmmaker can lapse into off-putting sadism, a kind of maliciousness towards the characters and, by extension, the audience that dares to care about them. The films become the equivalent of straw man arguments, with characters set up for the sole purpose of being knocked down. It’s not important who they are, what the believe. They’re only there to make points about roiling inhumanity, a practice that entirely undercuts the point because there’s not emotional investment. In my limited experience with his work, I’ll concede that this is a pitfall that Haneke himself doesn’t always avoid. He absolutely manages to in Cache, for a very simple, straightforward reason. No matter how rough the material, no matter how much Haneke pushes the audience towards discomfort, he always keeps the film deeply grounded in well-drawn, nuanced characters.

Daniel Auteuil, possessor of the saddest face in international cinema (even when he’s happy, he looks on the verge of solemnity or outright sorrow), plays a television talk show host who begins receiving vaguely menacing videotapes and drawings at his home. While he initial feels and expresses pure bafflement at these items, he comes to realize that they represent an intentional reminder of past transgressions, particularly one well buried secret from his youth. The film depicts the way outside forces can push people, harm them in entirely unexpected ways at entirely unexpected times. But it’s also about the way we do that to ourselves, the way in which small prompts can unleash torrents of our own inner guilt, the way our own psyches can conduct the greatest betrayals, dragging us under, convincing us of the worst, with a thoroughness that no separate person could ever accomplish. Haneke brings all of this to the screen with brutal authority. The tension that builds between Auteuil’s character and his wife, played expertly by Juliette Binoche, is nearly unbearable, as the film essentially asks how authentically we present ourselves to anyone. When does personal reinvention and moving on from past shame transform into dishonesty.

In the process, Haneke employs filmmaking techniques in fascinating ways, led by the image on that videotape that first arrives, setting the plot in motion. It is an extended shot of the home that will receive the tape, a shot not dramatically different than the sort of establishing shot that might be used in any number of films. By using something so familiar and instilling it with dread, Haneke immediately upends the expectations of how films work, what sort of shots stand for the fundamentals of narrative storytelling and what sort of shots cue us that something more dangerous is afoot. What’s more, by filling the screen with that shot–there is no hint in the frame of the television is is being watched on, no distancing reminder by showing the borders of the screen around the image–Haneke adds layers onto the image and heightens its effect. We in the audience become both complicit and intimidated. In that moment, looking at that image, we are both the perpetrator and the victim, staring at the home with the same unwavering intensity as the person who set up that camera, while also feeling the confused sensation of sorting out the tape’s inscrutable meaning that would be the inevitable response of someone who received it. Other directors might let us off the hook somehow. Not Haneke. He wants this to be troubling, haunting, as assuredly as if it were a held shot of our own home, carrying the implicit threat that if it can be surreptitiously watched it can also be entered, assaulted, defiled. It’s a single shot, but it’s genius is that it carries, without straining from the burden, a mile of meaning.

Haneke lets uncertainty reign. While many elements of the film are completely clear, especially the psychologies of the characters involved and the details of devastating past incident, Haneke offers no simple solutions. Even as the plot marches down the dark path it must follow, there are many questions that aren’t answered definitively. Ambiguity abounds. Some plot points may have logical inferences, but they may not be confirmed, just as closure is sometimes reached in real life not because of unassailable proof, but because we simply decide to believe in the veracity of our own suspicions. These are the sort of gray areas that Michael Haneke bravely traffics in. He may not let his audience wriggle free safely, but he is no less relentless with himself. He gives himself extremely difficult challenges and proceeds to face them. He’ll best them, or crash spectacularly trying to. In the case of Cache, he emerges the victor, with a fierce piece of art as the spoils.

(Posted simultaneously to “Jelly-Town!”)