February 05, 2006
Caché
Not quite sure what to make of Michael Haneke's new film, Caché, seen in a tiny theater, sharing the front row with a party of five or more French persons, who also seemed somewhat nonplussed.
Though it earns its effects, its moments of disturbance, there's also a limit to the strategy of representing national/political struggles through the structure of family relations. The allegory of the fraternal here is far more persuasive than Arnaud Desplechin's awkward Leo, Playing "In the Company of Men," but in the end displays the limits of allegory itself, which implies a decodability that the movie is then compelled to wrestle mightily against.
The film is structured around two things. The first is the word "nothing" (rien), which is repeated incessantly throughout the movie; there's scarcely any question (what's going on, what did you do today, what's wrong, what's the import of that, what caused him to feel that way, etc etc) that can't be answered with this single word. The lite reading (which shows up in several reviews) concerns the failed communication of the aging bourgeois couple, which is somehow either the cause of the final, ambiguous events, or an effect of the presence of the something that can't be said.
But that really won't do, and limns exactly one of the failings of the allegorical structure. On the one hand, domestic fissures can scarcely bee causal; we know this is a story of the return of the repressed, or the collection of unacknowledged debt, and nothing can undo the initial repression or avert its return. On the other, to spend so much attention on the family fallout of the repression is at once cliché and a lowering of the film's national/political stakes, which are not so much screened as supplanted by domestic drama, the Battle of Algiers as retold by The New Yorker's fiction editor.
Indeed, one must largely ignore the marital tension (and that's a lot of ignoring) to find the film particularly powerful, to engage its nothing. Nothing becomes a pit into which all specific meanings are sacrificed only to be reborn as an unsayable something that threatens each character with destruction (regarding this howling white space, one notes that the son Pierrot's school is College lycee Stephane Mallarmé)—a someting that might well be described as history itself (just as one might understand that history itself is making the mysterious videotapes that appear a la Lost Highway; they are shot, to adapt Prof. Louis-Georges Schwartz's formulation, from history's point of view).
Beyond the rien that is not there is the rien that is. The movie depends on the physical aging, beyond the proscenium, of the once-irresistable and irresistably French stars, Daniel Auteuil (actually born in Algiers in 1950) and Juliette Binoche, each of whom here seems thick, slack, sculpted from lardoon. This more than any narrative move or linguistic device gives force to the sense of corrupted entitlement, lost erotism, congealed history. The sense that something has gone horrribly, unsayably wrong with Frenchness itself, with France's capacity to represent itself through romantic pale beauty; and the sense that this collapse must inevitably be captured by history's camera—this tells the story far more powerfully than the banalities of domestic dynamics. The movie might finally have been more effective had it simply montaged chronological clips of the two actors from the 'Seventies through the present, inserting flash shots of bleeding and drowning Algerians during each cut.
Posted by jane at February 5, 2006 02:13 PM | TrackBack