Cache, Part 1

French films, even those directed by Germans, always seem to have much better dialogue than American films. Maybe that's because I watch far more films in English and therefore a greater percentage of that is crap.

I just caught Cache at the Bethesda Landmark. I knew a little of the plot going in, but was trying to avoid hearing much more of it. Still, even knowing what I knew, I thought, would spoil what was happening.

It's to Haneke's credit that the early parts of the film are filled with dread, making the viewer conscious of the film as film, as a viewer, as someone who watches what is being shown. A good film tends to draw you into the story, so you are involved, and don't realize what's being presented is, in fact, film, even if you know that it is obviously film. Thus, you can be wholly engaged watching Star Wars, knowing it is a fantastical story, and yet, be sucked into this space opera.

Cache plays a kind of trick that Atom Egoyan is fond of, although Egoyan is far more obvious about what he does. Most Egoyan film uses video. Video is seen as a kind of memory, and as such, despite its fidelity, like memory, it is selective, and possibly unreliable, because the images have to be interpreted. Having something recorded on film or video is, therefore, not as objective as it would seem.

Haneke's goal with video seem quite different. He is playing with our sense of security, our sense of being private when we choose to be private, and of people not caring about us.

The film ends, to me, with more questions than answers, and that, too, seems rather European. An American film might have sought to answer all the questions posed in the film. I have several theories about what has happened, none of it terribly satisfying.

The film reminds me a little of David Lynch, except that Lynch tends to be far creepier in what he presents. For the most part, Haneke presents the mysterious terror of a well-to-do French couple in as naturalistic a way as one can possibly imagine.

If the film did not have this inherent sense of dread about it, it could have served as a standard family drama.

When you watch a good art film, you have, in your mind, a way to resolve the situation, but you know it's too clean, too pat. Or you think , much like horror genres, that the director will cheat, to provide scares. When the son appears to have been abducted, you feel Haneke has fallen into thriller genre conventions, and has put us, the viewer, into sympathy mode with the parents, and yet, Haneke doesn't do anything like that.

It says something about the naturalism of the film when one thing you can commend is a marital fight. Rarely are there real arguments in films, at least, those that sound real. This sounds like a real couple fighting, saying things couples might say. There appears to be a history between the two, and between Georges and his mother.

Even the rooms, the way they're decorated seems reasonable, although I always find art directors love to dress up teenage boys and girls rooms, so that it looks interesting, busy.

Anyway, I'll talk more about the film later. I do wonder though, if my knowledge of the history between France and Algeria were more thorough, would I follow the film better. I have a sense the film serves as a kind of allegory, and not just the literal story it is telling.

More to come.