Caché
	(out of four)
	Sony Picture Classics
	Written and Directed by Michael Haneke
	Starring Daniel Auteuil, Juliette Binoche, Maurice Bénichou, Annie Girardot, Bernard Le Coq, Walid Afkir, Lester Makedonsky, Daniel Duval, Nathalie Richard, Denis Podalydès and Aïssa Maïga
	Rated R

In his masterpiece "Caché," Michael Haneke turns everyday life into a quiet but haunting nightmare of childhood guilt. With eloquent simplicity, the film disorients its audience by breaking all the subconscious rules of the cinematic lens. Faint feelings of pain and paranoia increase as the film pushes relentlessly toward an unsolvable mystery. Long after the projector has cooled down, these feelings grow, circularly suggesting and dismissing new ideas.

Haneke, an Austrian writer/director who has spent most of his time working in France as of late, made a name for himself with works that tested the limits of shocking violence and our response to it. But his recent films have been simmering character studies like "The Piano Teacher" that feature violence only as a short outcome to deeper issues. "Caché" (which translates to "Hidden") contains one very unexpected surprise—perhaps the most shocking scene in cinema this decade—but moves to it and from it gradually building its feelings of guilt and anger until they reach their conclusion.

Daniel Auteuil stars as Georges, the host of a literary discussion show on public television whose family starts receiving bizarre, unmarked tapes of their lives. His wife, Anne (Juliette Binoche), and son, Pierrot (Lester Makedonsky), have no idea who might be behind them, or how the perpetrator managed to conceal the camera so well.

The first tapes are bizarrely mundane, but as more arrive, they gradually start to include clues that suggest a deep knowledge of Georges's past—one looks out the window as a car travels to the farm where he grew up. They pose questions about how responsible people are for past actions, in terms of both personal childhood memories and large-scale politics. Georges's childhood effortss to keep, to paraphrase the film, what is his touch on greater issues of conflict and tragedy in recent French history.

Auteuil gives one of the best performances of his career as a man who struggles with mounting stress and a haunting past that cause his charming facade starts to disintegrate. Georges could easily be an unlikable jerk, but Auteuil makes us understand and sympathize with his predicament, despite his foolish and/or pig-headed decisions.

Binoche is equally skilled in her portrayal of a character who is often left out of the loop and has to try to catch up with what is going on. She plays role of the wife with hints of doubt as the woman begins to see the hidden elements of her husband's personality.

Haneke makes a few choices in his visual scheme that turn the film and the viewer in on themselves. The material on the videotapes isn't presented in the lower-resolution quality that is traditional when representing home video, but exactly matches the rest of the film. The opening shot of the outside of the family's house only becomes known as a video when the characters break into the story and rewind. Haneke uses this switch tactic later in the film as well. The image is too clear to be shot from a window, Georges comments in the openening scene, but later a (presumably) non-video shot of Georges walking into a convenience store reveals itself, as the camera pans, to have been imperceptibly shot through a window.

Haneke uses wide angles and long takes, and, through compositions and post-scene revelations, it slowly becomes clear that almost any scene could be a recording. One scene in particular, between Anne and a family friend, seems to be a tape that a character has seen, but nothing in the text or visuals conclusively identifies it as such.

Many believe that an event "hidden" in the wide closing shot of the film unlocks the mystery of the tapes, but it seems more a message of hope for the future—the new generation overcoming the sins of the old—than an explanation.

Explaining the origin of the tapes isn't really possible. They certainly exist in the environment of the film, and not just in one character's mind, so there's no double-cross twist. But just as Haneke doesn't fulfill standard expectations of explanations, the effort to easily explain the tapes' existence will not yield definitive answers. "Caché" takes place in a nightmare mindset, not the real world.

"Caché" isn't the kind of mystery that provides the typical closure expected with the genre. It's an exploration of the psyche that poses more questions as it answers others. When we wake from it, it lingers with us, and we wonder if its characters will ever stir from the hypnotic nightmare they're in.

jeremy [at] saltshakermagazine.com