Hidden (2004)
(Caché)
Country: FR/ÖST/GER/IT
Technical: col 118m
Director: Michael Haneke
Cast: Daniel Auteuil, Juliette Binoche, Maurice Bénichou, Annie Girardot
Synopsis:
A couple starts to receive videotapes consisting of surveillance footage apparently taken from across the road. The prankster also sends cryptic messages which nevertheless have a resonance in the husband's childhood, a resonance confirmed when the provenance of the material is betrayed. Or is it?
Review:
The director cannily melds his previous forays into video territory with a Ring-like mystery wherein the offending tape-recording is a manifestation of the protagonist's guilt, and by extension - he is a television intellectual à la Bernard Pivot - that of the French middle classes generally. Phantoms such as the Papon-presided liquidation of Algerians in Paris in 1961 are evoked in timely fashion and, notably, by a foreign director who has already anatomised the French social contract in Code Unknown. This is a very fine, assured piece of work, which communicates the lot of its disenfranchised without sentimentality, as well as sympathetically charting the angst of its haunted couple.
(Caché)
Country: FR/ÖST/GER/IT
Technical: col 118m
Director: Michael Haneke
Cast: Daniel Auteuil, Juliette Binoche, Maurice Bénichou, Annie Girardot
Synopsis:
A couple starts to receive videotapes consisting of surveillance footage apparently taken from across the road. The prankster also sends cryptic messages which nevertheless have a resonance in the husband's childhood, a resonance confirmed when the provenance of the material is betrayed. Or is it?
Review:
The director cannily melds his previous forays into video territory with a Ring-like mystery wherein the offending tape-recording is a manifestation of the protagonist's guilt, and by extension - he is a television intellectual à la Bernard Pivot - that of the French middle classes generally. Phantoms such as the Papon-presided liquidation of Algerians in Paris in 1961 are evoked in timely fashion and, notably, by a foreign director who has already anatomised the French social contract in Code Unknown. This is a very fine, assured piece of work, which communicates the lot of its disenfranchised without sentimentality, as well as sympathetically charting the angst of its haunted couple.
(Caché)
Country: FR/ÖST/GER/IT
Technical: col 118m
Director: Michael Haneke
Cast: Daniel Auteuil, Juliette Binoche, Maurice Bénichou, Annie Girardot
Synopsis:
A couple starts to receive videotapes consisting of surveillance footage apparently taken from across the road. The prankster also sends cryptic messages which nevertheless have a resonance in the husband's childhood, a resonance confirmed when the provenance of the material is betrayed. Or is it?
Review:
The director cannily melds his previous forays into video territory with a Ring-like mystery wherein the offending tape-recording is a manifestation of the protagonist's guilt, and by extension - he is a television intellectual à la Bernard Pivot - that of the French middle classes generally. Phantoms such as the Papon-presided liquidation of Algerians in Paris in 1961 are evoked in timely fashion and, notably, by a foreign director who has already anatomised the French social contract in Code Unknown. This is a very fine, assured piece of work, which communicates the lot of its disenfranchised without sentimentality, as well as sympathetically charting the angst of its haunted couple.