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Cache (Hidden)
by Sony Pictures
| List Price: |
$14.94 |
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$10.49 & eligible for FREE Super Saver Shipping on orders over $25. |
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$4.45 (29%) |
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DVD
Sony
Publisher: Sony Pictures
Format: Closed-captioned, Color, Dolby, DTS Surround Sound, Dubbed, DVD-Video, Subtitled, Widescreen, NTSC
Actors: Daniel Auteuil, Juliette Binoche, Maurice Bénichou, Annie Girardot, Bernard Le Coq
Academy Award®-winner Juliette Binoche (1997, Best Supporting Actress, The English Patient) stars in CACHÉ, a psychological thriller about a TV talk show host and his wife who are terrorized by surveillance videos of their private life. Delivered by an anonymous stalker, the tapes reveal secret after secret until obsession, denial and deceit take hold of the couple and hurl them to the point of no return. CACHÉ is director Michael Haneke's dark vision of a relationship torn mercilessly apart by the camera's unblinking eye.
Hidden throughout Caché is the sense that you should be watching every moment in this film closely, just as the protagonists are themselves being watched by someone unknown. Georges and Anne Laurent’s (Daniel Auteuil and Juliette Binoche) enviable lives are terrorized by the sudden arrival on their doorstep of a videotaped recording of their Parisian townhouse. It’s nothing but a long, unedited shot of the façade of their house, but it’s disturbing nonetheless. Soon another arrives, this time of the farmhouse Georges grew up in, and then another of a car driving down a suburban street, and a walk down a hallway to a low-rent apartment. Again the videos are benign but unsettling. Then the mystery becomes more threatening when they receive gruesome postcards depicting child-like drawings of bloody, dead stick figures. Georges believes he knows who the culprit is, but for reasons all his own refuses to let his wife in on the secret. Clearly more is hidden here than just the identity of their stalker. In Caché, writer and director Michael Haneke skillfully, methodically pulls back multiple layers of deception, like new skin being pulled off an old wound. he masterfully fuses elements of his predecessors to create a film that is haunting and memorable. There is Bergman's fascination with the complexity of relationships, the suspense and lurking danger of Hitchcock, and the unique cinematic sensibility of Antonioni. In fact, the provocative final shot is practically a tribute to The Passenger--a lot of people will want to rewatch it many times to see what they can find in it (if, after watching it, you are still unsatisfied with the resolution, then watch the interview with Haneke in the DVD's special features for his insights). It's a film of great effect and intrigue. There are no easy resolutions, and the answers given in this mystery will only lead to more questions. --Daniel Vancini
| Customer Reviews: |
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| Hardly Hitchcock |
| Customer Rating: 2 out of 5 |
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Anyone who expects Hitchcock suspense from this will be disappointed. It doesn't translate well into French. It's not scary and you won't be shocked, except by the suicide. It's a little too long and the moral tale at the center is quite French, so anyone else may not get it.
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| Frustrating and fascinating |
| Customer Rating: 5 out of 5 |
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The comfortable lives of Georges (Daniel Auteuil) and Anne (Juliette Binoche), an upper-class French couple, are disrupted by the appearance of mysterious videotapes which show that their home is under surveillance. This becomes the trigger for Georges's guilty flashbacks concerning a boy who lived with his family when he was growing up, with tremendous consequences for his married life.
Director/screenwriter Michael Haneke's film frustrates many viewers with its inconclusive narrative. I was fascinated by the theme of guilt: how it can bubble just under the surface of our lives, its destructive power, and the influence it can have on others, including the next generation. I have come up with an explanation for events that satisfies me, and other viewers are invited to put together their own interpretations. It is a tribute to the richness of the film that it can support varying analyses. However, a film needs more than interesting themes to be a complete success; even when I was most disoriented by the narrative, I was riveted by the mystery at the heart of "Cache."
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| Subtly excellent |
| Customer Rating: 5 out of 5 |
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This is a brilliant film--many of the scenes allude to a larger metaphor regarding French colonialism and colonialist attitudes, including the more obvious current western/non-western tensions. The director does not let the minority position off the hook either: the Arab son appears to deny what it seems he must have done; and in a movie where nothing is insignificant, a brief altercation between lead character Georges and a black cyclist reveal that both were fantastically out of line. Another time the film makes a subtle highlight of Georges, serious topical-intellectual talk show host, in a film studio editing his own live interviews--he is literally re-writing history and applying power by manipulating information for his own purposes. Scenes like this are throughout "Cache": nothing can be taken for granted. The director has studied his Kubrick and Bunuel and come up with a very timely classic.
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| MICHAEL HANEKE, OPUS 9 |
| Customer Rating: 5 out of 5 |
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***** 2005. Written and directed by Michael Haneke. Three prizes at Cannes. Georges is receiving videotapes of himself with his family. Soon he suspects Majid to be the man responsible for this situation. Like Jean-Luc Godard, Steven Soderbergh, David Lynch or Atom Egoyan, the Austrian director Michael Haneke likes to play with the images. Not the simple images found 24 times in a second on the screen but rather with the recorded images and the way to manipulate them. I found HIDDEN fascinating because, during each scene, I had to discover whether the point of view of the camera was objective or subjective. Highly recommended.
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| subtle and thought-provoking |
| Customer Rating: 4 out of 5 |
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Far from being "pretentious," this film was very true to life in its pacing, its unadorned visuality, and its reluctance to give clear-cut answers. It would have been very easy for the director to turn this plot into an overblown thriller of the kind some reviewers seem to have wanted, but I'm glad he didn't.
My criticism is that the film remains something of an intellectual exercise, failing to delve into the characters' psyches as far as it could have done. The dynamics of the husband-and-wife relationship could have helped to supply this psychological depth, but it remains underdeveloped - and I was VERY disappointed to see Juliette Binoche so underused when she was one of the reasons I wanted to see the movie in the first place. (What were they thinking?)
Even so, "Cache" left me thinking, and I can't say that of very many films - hence the 4 stars.
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