Caché (Michael Haneke, 2005)

Caché (Michael Haneke, 2005)

Cast: Daniel Auteuil, Juliette Binoche, Maurice Bénichou, Annie Girardot, Bernard Le Coq, Walid Afkir, Lester Makedonsky, Daniel Duval, Nathalie Richard. Screenplay: Michael Haneke. Cinematography: Christian Berger. Production design: Emmanuel de Chauvigny, Christoph Kanter. Film editing: Michael Hudecek, Nadine Muse.

Caché is one of those films I want to like more than I really do. It's a thriller without a payoff, somewhat in the mode of Michelangelo Antonioni's L'Avventura (1960) in that it's a mystery that doesn't get solved. But Michael Haneke is a colder, more cynical filmmaker than Antonioni, so that I can never quite shake the feeling that Haneke is just toying with us, parading themes like deception and guilt before us without having anything particularly revealing to say about those topics. On the other hand, we live in an age of increasing invasions of privacy, when the technologies we depend on seem to betraying our secrets to the world, so Haneke's film may have an element of prescience to it. The premise is this: a couple, Georges and Anne Laurent, played with their usual edgy brilliance by Daniel Auteuil and Juliette Binoche, receive a videotape that's simply a record of the façade of their house during several hours of what seems to be random day. It's a premise that David Lynch used some years earlier in Lost Highway (1997), but where Lynch expanded from that into a florid nightmare of a story, Haneke simply traces the slow effect of that enigmatic tape on the Laurents, who are initially unsettled by it but not particularly concerned. And then more tapes arrive, some wrapped in childlike drawings that have a more sinister effect, and the Laurents begin to worry. Is it a threat, a kind of terrorism, or is it just a prank, played perhaps by one of the friends of their teenage son, Pierrot? Eventually, Georges realizes that he is the primary target of this strange harassment, and that the perpetrator is someone who knows about something that happened when Georges was only 6 years old. The confrontation with the man he suspects is responsible for the tapes proves calamitous, made worse by Georges's initial attempt to keep the truth from Anne. Still, at the film's end, there is no real resolution: We may suspect we know the truth, but Haneke never gives us certainty. It's a film that provokes analysis, but I'm not convinced that it entirely deserves it.

Funny Games (Michael Haneke, 1997)

Arno Frisch in Funny Games 

Anna: Susanne Lothar
George: Ulrich Mühe
Paul: Arno Frisch
Peter: Frank Giering
Schorschi: Stefan Clapczynski
Gerda: Doris Kunstmann
Fred: Christoph Bantzer
Robert: Wolfgang Glück
Gerda's Sister: Susanne Meneghel
Eva: Monika Zallinger

Director: Michael Haneke
Screenplay: Michael Haneke
Cinematography: Jürgen Jürges
Production design: Christoph Kanter
Film editing: Andreas Prochaska

Funny Games is Michael Haneke's cold and nasty take on the horror-thriller genre, particularly the home-invasion subgenre in which a psychopath traps a family in their home and torments them. The locus classicus of the genre is probably Cape Fear, in both the original film by J. Lee Thompson in 1962 and the 1991 remake by Martin Scorsese, although there have been plenty of other movies designed to needle our complacent sense that we're safe at home. Haneke's version is effective in that regard, although he takes the suspense a step further by making us complicit in the torture: Paul, the more dominant of the two young psychopaths in the film, breaks the fourth wall to wink and smirk and even talk at us as we watch his plans unfold. At one point, he says to us, referring to the family he's tormenting, "You're on their side, aren't you?" And at the point where, as in a conventional horror-thriller, the family seems to have turned the tables on their captors, he comments, "We're not up to feature film length yet," meaning that the plot must have a few twists to go. And finally, he shows us that we are among his captives: When Anna suddenly grabs the rifle and blows away Peter, the other tormenter, Paul grabs a video remote and rewinds the scene, then gains the upper hand again, leaving the family (and us) at his mercy. In sum, this is a nihilistic film, which Haneke designed to rub our noses in our prurience where violence is concerned. He wanted to film it in the United States, as a kind of statement about American violence, but was forced to make it in Austria. But after the film succeeded and Haneke had built his international career, he was able to remake Funny Games with an English-speaking cast in 2007. More on that version later.

The Castle (Michael Haneke, 1997)

Ulrich Mühe in The Castle

K.: Ulrich Mühe
Frieda: Susanne Lothar
Artur: Frank Giering
Jeremias: Felix Eitner
Barnabas: André Eisermann
Olga: Dörte Lyssewski
Amalia: Inga Busch
Erlanger: Hans Diehl
Pepi: Birgit Linauer
Narrator: Udo Samel

Director: Michael Haneke
Screenplay: Michael Haneke
Based on a novel by Franz Kafka
Cinematography: Jirí Stibr
Production design: Christoph Kanter

There's an odd resonance between Ulrich Mühe's frustrated K. in The Castle and the role for which he's best known in America, the anonymously gray Stasi spy Gerd Wiesler in The Lives of Others (Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, 2006). Both are trapped in systems not of their making and are given tedious tasks that ultimately prove meaningless: K. to serve as a land surveyor in a village that doesn't want one and is so covered with blowing snow that there's hardly any land to survey, Wiesler to listen in on and try to trap a playwright whose crimes against the state are, if they exist, minimal. Both try to make the best of impossible situations, K. by doggedly persisting in his attempts to communicate with the unseen and unapproachable Castle, Wiesler by doing his job dutifully until its absurdity becomes intolerable. Absurdity is, to be sure, what Franz Kafka's unfinished novel is all about: People in it behave absurdly -- even the protagonist who, in a particularly dreamlike moment, finds himself hiding under a counter with the mistress of the man he wants to meet and having sex with her. Even the people who might help him, like his goofy assistants Artur and Jeremias or the eager emissary from the Castle, Barnabas, only lead him into further frustrations. Michael Haneke has followed the novel's plot faithfully, even to the extent of leaving off in mid-sentence at the point where the dying Kafka abandoned the manuscript. The result is a film both provocative and tedious: There's a scene near the end in which K. is struggling to stay awake, and I found myself fighting slumber, too. But the commitment with which Haneke and his cast throw themselves into a project that itself is a bit supererogatory -- does Kafka's unfinished story really need to be an unfinished film? -- is impressive.