Caché

C+

Directed by Michael Haneke

Every second film being produced in France at the moment appears to be a psychological thriller of the Dominic Moll, Francois Ozon mold, i.e. realistic, low budget thrillers that mostly focus on the perils of middle class Frenchmen having their minds toyed with. In the best cases, such as Moll's "With a Friend Like Harry," such films can be taught, tense exercises in psychological suspense. In less successful cases, such as Ozon's "La Piscine" and Haneke's "Caché," labelling a film as a "psychological suspense" appears to be used as ploy to get away with making boring, tedious films with no narrative structure or plot to butress their meager stab at creating drama out of the mundane.

Haneke's film opens as couple Georges and Anne are reviewing a videocassette sent anonymously to their home. The cassette features a videorecording of the front of their house and is accompanied by a crude drawing of a child spitting blood. Georges and Anne ignore the anonymous mail and go about their business but soon receive more of these unwanted deliveries. As Georges attempts to discover who is behind the anonymous packages, he realizes that the individual responsible for SPAMing his mailbox with unwanted videorecordings may have a personal vendetta against him that dates back to his childhood.

Haneke is not a bad director but this effort is completely forgettable. The "suspense" that Haneke tries to build surrounding the motive and origin of the videorecordings is ruined by the foreshadowing of the culprit's identity early in the film. Furthermore, the actual psychological drama Haneke tries to infuse his film with, in this case nominally revolving around Georges' lingering feelings of guilt and his crumbling relationship with his wife, are contrived and not at all believable. The issue here is that the offence which Georges commited as a young child is so minor (and arguably not an offence at all) that the reaction of his tormentor is laughably disproportionate, sapping any sense of credibility from the whole thing. Adding insult to what is already a rather injuriously bad movie is that fact that Auteil and Binoche, two great actors in their own right, largely seem to be going through the motions here, trying to create the dramatic tension between their characters that the director no doubt required but the script did not provide for. As I said in my earlier review of Dominic Moll's "Lemming," Moll is by far the director best suited for this type of film and when comparing Moll's film to Haneke's the disparity in talent and execution, not to mention their relative comfort with the material, is noticeable.