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.

Jean de Florette / Manon of the Spring (Claude Berri, 1986)

There's no good reason why Jean de Florette and Manon of the Spring should have been two films rather than one. They were shot together over the course of seven months, but released separately, Manon following Jean after about three months. Shown together as one film, they would total some 230 minutes -- only a bit longer than Ben-Hur (William Wyler, 1959) at 212 minutes or Lawrence of Arabia (David Lean, 1962) at 222 minutes. But the length of those films seems consistent with their epic pretensions, whereas Jean/Manon together amount to a domestic melodrama -- an entertaining one, with a beautiful Provençal setting, but far from an epic. Their separate releases feel a bit like a con -- as in economics. Films of that blockbuster length are a drag on the exhibitor, who must schedule fewer showings per day, so it probably made sense to release Jean, which unabashedly announces at the end that it's "part one," to whet an appetite for Manon, whose posters announced it as the second part of Jean de Florette. Voilà! double the box office take. In fact, Manon of the Spring had been filmed before, by Marcel Pagnol in 1952, and it had been a long film, as much as four hours, before being cut by the distributor. Pagnol was so upset by this experience that he turned the screenplay into a novel, L'Eau des Collines, adding the story of Manon's father, Jean, which had been only a backstory in his film. And it's this novel that Claude Berri decided to adapt into his two films. The problem I see, having just watched Berri's films back to back, is that there's not quite enough material for two. Jean de Florette is an overextended prequel, introducing the characters of César Soubeyran (Yves Montand) and his nephew Ugolin (Daniel Auteuil), and their villainous attempt to cut off the water supply to Jean (Gérard Depardieu), the newcomer who inherits the estate they covet. Or perhaps Manon of the Spring is a thinly developed sequel, in which Jean's daughter, Manon (Emmanuelle Béart), avenges her father. If Jean had been trimmed of some of the scenes of Jean raising rabbits and Manon of some of the shots of Manon gamboling with her goats in the hills -- as well as the romantic subplot involving the new village schoolteacher (Hippolyte Girardot) -- both stories could have fitted nicely into one movie. Manon climaxes with a scene in which César learns an uncomfortable truth about Jean's parentage, but Berri and co-screenwriter Gérard Brach drag the film out after that revelation, which should have been left to make its impact. Still, Berri's films have much to recommend them, especially the performances of Montand, Auteuil, and Depardieu (the last is sorely missed in the second film) and the beautiful cinematography of Bruno Nuytten. Jean-Claude Petit's score makes good use of themes from the overture to Giuseppe Verdi's La Forza del Destino.  

Queen Margot (Patrice Chéreau, 1994)

Daniel Auteuil and Isabelle Adjani in Queen Margot

I thought I knew enough about 16th-century French history, if only from reading Robert Merle's Fortunes of France books, to follow Patrice Chéreau's Queen Margot fairly easily. But the film's rather hyperactive opening almost kept me in the dark: literally, because it begins with a Protestant man accidentally getting in bed with a Catholic man, and an ensuing fight. Then we shift to the wedding of the Catholic Marguerite de Valois (Isabelle Adjani) to the Protestant Henri de Navarre (Daniel Auteuil), and an ensuing riotous wedding night, during which Marguerite refuses to go to bed with her new husband but, feeling randy, goes out into the streets to pick up a man. The man, with whom she has very passionate sex against a wall, turns out to be the Protestant we saw earlier, La Môle (Vincent Pérez). And when Marguerite rescues him during the St. Bartholomew's Day massacre, they begin an affair. But wait, there's more. There's court intrigue involving the somewhat insane Charles IX (Jean-Hugues Anglade); his mother, Catherine de' Medici (Virna Lisi); and his brother, the Duke of Anjou (Pascal Greggory). There's internal and international squabbling between Protestants and Catholics. There are poisonings and boar hunts, and a lot of other stuff. Eventually, I sorted it all out, but it left me feeling a bit overwhelmed. It's beautifully filmed by Philippe Rousselot, and the costumes by Moidele Bickel were nominated for an Oscar. The screenplay by Chéreau and Danièle Thompson is adapted from a novel by Alexandre Dumas, and neither screenplay nor novel should be relied on for historical accuracy. Adjani seems to struggle a bit with the vagaries of her character, whose sympathies shift from Catholic to Protestant and from man to man all too easily. The standout performance is that of Lisi, who was an international sex symbol in the 1950s and '60s, and makes the scheming Catherine a figure of some complexity.