zicteban
Movie's director plays much too much with viewers suggesting illogical events or matters just in order to get them lost.
Besides, the main character's reactions can be seen as too caricatural and even unbelievable.
The end opens up other dimensions in the understanding of the story which, once again, is merely another trick to make people think about a movie which is simply irrelevant most of the times.
Sorry to say it, but suiciding because of a childhood trauma, although having built one's own life and being a father, is at the minimum extremely depressing and absurd if not completely impossible in reality.
Rory Sturdy
Liberty, Equality, Fraternity. This is France's established, officially disseminated political memory. The Storming of the Bastille on the afternoon of 14 July 1789: this is the event and date that French citizens have etched in their collective memory.However, the date in France's repressed political memory, which is cited in Michael Haneke's Caché, is October 17, 1961. On this date, French police brutally quashed peaceful demonstrations of hundreds of Algerian protesters who had congregated in Paris to protest against a French security crackdown during the Algerian War of Independence. The official death toll the following day was two dead but this figure was disputed with reports of dozens of bodies found floating in the River Seine. (The figure cited in the film is 200 dead).Haneke's film cites this clash, which is a sore spot in Frances history and something that was hidden from France's political memory for decades. A public inquiry was prevented and access to archived police records relating to the event was not allowed until 1998.However, Caché is not a film explicitly about these events, they function in the narrative as a framework for the complex relationship of memory, forgetting, and guilt. Within the film's narrative, the Algerian character Majid's parents were killed in this massacre.The opening shot is immobile… unwavering, unflinching, mechanical, objective. It is digital video footage: cheap, the medium of the masses. It is post-modern, it depicts the cold light of present day. One of the opening lines: "It doesn't look like it was filmed through a window". It is unvarnished and unedited (unlike the protagonist Georges' TV program and life). It is real. Nothing of note happens in the taped footage. The lead characters rewind the footage and watch again. A trick is revealed. We realize we are watching taped footage that the 'agents' of the scene are also watching. What are we ultimately watching? We are watching the watchers, the chattering classes of contemporary France; those who interpret and disseminate France's political memory. We are watching them manipulate history. Edit time. Rewind, fast-forward, cut, omit. (Editing an episode of his TV show later on, where he cuts back in: the woman on screen smiles and says "it's poetic license, no?").Georges hides from his wife, from his son, from his mother, from his friends. His wife Anne finally breaks down later in the film, pleading: "People talk to each other, don't they?"The mother, too, also keeps memories hidden. She claims to not be aware of whom Georges is referring to when he mentions Majid, despite the fact that this was a child she had planned to adopt. She has suppressed the memory: "It was a long time ago. And it's not a happy memory".The Euronews footage from Iraq (which appears at the golden section of the film) depicts events that may well be repressed in the political memory of certain European countries decades in the future. France (along with Haneke's homeland of Germany) famously refused to join the USA's 'coalition of the willing' in 2003 to invade Iraq. Caché can be seen as a riposte to French commentators who were suggesting at the time of filming that France had somehow taken the moral high ground. Wait, says Haneke, we have plenty of skeletons in our own closet.As the narrative scene plays out, neither actor is center of frame – it is the television screen, the news footage – now of conflict in Palestine - which is center. It is in the background and the foreground simultaneously. We try to ignore it to follow the narrative, but it is difficult. It refuses to be hidden. One recalls the intentional confusion between the director's camera and the video in the opening scene. The news footage references Italian and British forces. This is not simply a French film for French audiences. This is an international film for all nations. After Sajid completes his suicide, we see Georges has spent the following hours in the cinema. He has sought escape from the horrible reality in a dark room. Later he hides from his 'friends' in his darkened bedroom. Lastly, in his final scene, he closes all the curtains to block out the light."Do you expect me to apologize?" he asks Sajid's son towards the end of the film. (French president François Hollande would eventually apologize for the killings in 2012, seven years after this film was released).At the end of Caché, the protagonist lies down on his bed. A memory plays back in Georges' mind, one he has fought his entire life, since the age of six, to forget. It comes not as redemption but as a torturous thorn. Georges shows no remorse. There is no repentance or contrition. Thus, he will never know Liberty (he lives in a cage of lies of his own devise), Equality (apologies… are offerings that disrupt the established hierarchies and, as a result, level out differences) nor Fraternity (his would-be adopted brother is dead).
deepa pathak
Though labeled as a thriller, mystery, drama.... this is no ordinary thriller. No trash talk, not a hustle, bombs or guns. Something very impalpable starts creeping up silently and a subtle parallel movie starts unfolding before you. Viewers actually realize it much later. This movie is a guilt trip not of any individual but of every individual. Individual guilt turns collective and emerges with the memory of the year 1961, of large massacre of Algerian demonstrators and distortion of their their bodies. In so called free country no newspaper uttered a word about it. This denial and guilt at the foundation of western prosperity, fear, hatred, anger, suppression, alienation ...all manifest when people thought they have erased it, made it invisible and forgotten. It compels viewers to think about it in their own terms. To watch how this guilt builds mistrust and makes one behave in a very odd and unusual way with the most trusted ones is truly galvanic. The director gently pushes viewer to identify themselves with the action in response to this ever prevailing guilt and startles them. Like a fully grown tree's roots spread deep and wide, having the ability to support life in each of it's thinnest twig, the movie blows life into many possible reasons of logic, each bleak reason just as strong as the one already built. Eventually the bleak reason becomes stronger as the other dim reasons start to appear. We keep adding more logical explanations and ask deeper questions. We end up carrying home many unanswered questions, unsolved mysteries, unjustified judgments and conclusions, to interrogate ourselves;Which is exactly what the directed must have wanted...please correct me if I am wrong.In short, No answers but more questions !!Director Miachel Haneke has so skillfully crafted the movie that we put ourselves on trial and at the same time become our own judges. All the actors with even the smallest role have done a superb job.
