Review of Caché (2005) by Anonymous User — 13 Oct 2009

After a few days delving into Michael Haneke's work, this is the movie I'm looking for. I'm strangely excited for The Piano Teacher showing up in my mailbox. I went into this film knowing nothing about the plot and being taken back at how well it was executed, so I won't mention much of it here.

A lot of the credit must go to the sharp editing, fine-tuned to keep the audience interested and guessing through a very subtle 2-hour mystery. It's very clean and quaint, with zero musical accompaniment that I think adds to the dark tension of the film and the feeling of emptiness that comes with what the characters are dealing with in the film.

This is my favorite Haneke so far probably because it's the least conceptual that I have seen. Both Benny's Video and Funny Games dealt with a similar theme and tackled it in such different, highly specialized and idiosyncratic ways that it ran the risk of seeming too gimmicky and condescending to the viewer. Meanwhile, Cache adheres to the conventions of both an artsy fartsy film and the classic whodunnit with non-hokey twists and turns that deal with issues of guilt, paranoia, and trust. There's also apparently some political allegory in here, but the non-Euro in me missed that entire thing. If you're in the mood for something disturbing, something different, something with the lovely Juliet Binoche, something great definitely see it.

I've read some pretty interesting discussions regarding the (ambiguous) ending, and while I'm totally all for dissecting a film within an inch of its life, I side with the "it really doesn't matter" camp in Cache's ending. I didn't notice it anything going on in that final shot, myself. What do you think?