Michael Haneke's Cache

CineAction, Wntr, 2006 by Florence Jacobowitz

Michael Haneke's Cache is, as its title suggests, an exploration of what lies beneath the surface, hidden within the bourgeois myths of nationhood, culture, family. It borrows the form of a mystery thriller (not solving all of the enigmas presented or fully satisfying the demands of the genre) using its structure to raise highly politicized, disquieting questions about class and race, morality and accountability, within the home and beyond in the social world.

Cache investigates the privileged hermetic world of the white upper middle class family and in order to do so, takes as its premise the narrative conceit that an outsider is threatening the family. Georges and Anne Laurent/Daniel Auteuil and Juliette Binoche and their son Pierrot/Lester Makedonsky are sent videotapes of, for example, the comings and goings in front of their home, taken by a camera near the premises, or from a car outside of Georges's boyhood house. The surveillance implies an infringement of private space--the realm of the bourgeois domestic world that safeguards its private identity and thus, its security.

The contradiction implicit in bourgeois life is that success is dependent upon one's public image, display and conspicuous consumption, yet at the same time, the home and familial relations are private, and what is released in the social world is carefully monitored. Georges's identity encapsulates the contradiction with all its ironic implications. He is a public figure, a celebrity who hosts a popular talk show on television, a discussion of literature that carries an aura of intellectualism and refinement--high culture in a popular controlled format. He wears a public face by entering homes through his televised appearances. The Laurents are also intensely private people, living in a rarefied world of small at-home dinner parties with choice guests (including Anne's employer, a prominent publisher) who share and appreciate their class and status. Sending Georges and his wife (and later Georges's workplace) videotapes which he and Anne watch on their family television is profoundly ironic--it is an infringement that is delivered in the mode that most characterizes modern communication, that Georges and the public understand best--experiencing a modified version of reality from a safe distance, at home. In addition, the tapes are not distinguished visually from the rest of the film (they are shot in the same style and format, using long sequence shots, often from a fixed position) and this blurring of the boundaries raises epistemological questions regarding how images are read, how reality is validated through the image. Georges has no control over the illicit videotapes and, unlike his television program, cannot mediate or filter what is represented, thus his power is threatened.

The transgression implicit in the tapes--compelling one to view aspects of one's personal life--forces a reassessment and an accounting of actions in order to understand the motives of the aggrieved. Georges is sent on a trajectory against his will, beyond his control. He is also forced to reveal aspects of his life to his wife, to his friends and employer that are typically not shared or unearthed. Georges's secrets slowly emerge. The tapes that are accompanied by crude child-like drawings act as a catalyst that sparks his dreams, his memory, what has been buried and repressed. The tapes and pictures direct him from the present into the past; the images of the outside of his present home in an upper middle-class neighbourhood in Paris, the large ancestral estate in the country, a car-ride to a run down apartment in a working class suburb (on rue Lenin) lead Georges to remember and reevaluate the past, to evoke a childhood incident that reemerges to haunt him in a dream. It concerns an Algerian boy who lived with his parents on Georges's family's estate. He finally reveals to Anne (when the arrival of the tapes compel him to do so) how Majid's parents disappeared, presumably were killed, during the pro FLN demonstrations of October 1961, and that Georges's parents planned on adopting the son left behind. Georges sabotages these plans by maligning the child with false libelous accusations, which his parents accept. He rationalizes his behavior with the contention that he was a child at the time and therefore not accountable. The narrative of sibling rivalry, of the child who fears displacement and ensures his inheritance and position of power and privilege in the family has ancient antecedents in primal Biblical narratives, but in Cache, in contemporary France, the power struggle of family politics is complicated by both race and class.

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Cache raises historical stains that not only refuse to disappear (France's notorious oppression of its citizens of North African descent in the 60s) but have reemerged with a vengeance in the new millennium. The question of who is welcome to join the nation and enjoy full rights as citizens is more pressing than ever. (Ironically the news on the TV in Georges and Anne's home covers the usual tensions and violence in the Middle East or India, conveniently not addressing the conflicts at home, in France). France has never promoted multiculturalism or pluralism. Its xenophobic attitude has maintained that citizenship means adopting the dominant culture, but its intolerance of difference contradicts the idea of equal entry in terms of privilege, status and class. France's oppression of its North African emigres and racism is not easily discussed (coincidentally another film at the Toronto International Film Festival this year, Alain Tasma's October 17, 1961, explores these issues. In fact the scene of Majid/Maurice Benichou and his son/Walid Afkir being transported in the back of a police paddy wagon is eerily similar to the reenactments of the events in 1961 in Tasma's film). Cache links the past to the present; these problems remain in the culture. Georges's contentions that he should not be held accountable for actions expressed by a child are contradicted by his behaviour in the present. After leaving the police station (the couple's complaints of harassment fall on deaf ears as there is no evidence of physical damage to body or property), Georges emerges onto the road from between parked cars and is nearly knocked over by a young black man on a bike. He proceeds, in an explosive and rude manner, to berate the young man and almost initiates a fight, which Anne dissipates by partitioning the blame, suggesting that both the cyclist and her husband are at fault. Georges's reaction is not attributed simply to his frustration with the police's indifference; his eruption and lack of civility evidences a racist attitude. It implies a link between his experience of harassment through the tapes and his perception of race and the outsider in French society and culture, undermining the myth of integration, equality and an acceptance of diversity.