I’ve been hearing a lot about the movie Cache, winner of Best Director, FIPRESCI Prize and Prize of the Ecumenical Jury at Cannes and European Film Award and FIPRESCI Prize at the European Film Awards this year. The blurb from IMDB is really intriguing as well.
Georges, who hosts a TV literary review, receives packages containing videos of himself with his family — shot secretly from the street — and alarming drawings whose meaning is obscure. He has no idea who may be sending them. Gradually, the footage on the tapes becomes more personal, suggesting that the sender has known Georges for some time. Georges feels a sense of menace hanging over him and his family but, as no direct threat has been made, the police refuse to help…
Now you can catch the trailer over at Movies Online, and it looks really good. It’s starring Daniel Auteuil and Juliette Binoche which also bodes well for the movie.
Previously I’ve seen Code Unknown by the Writer\Director Michael Haneke, and I have to say I thought it was a stinker. However, I think I may find this one somewhat different. What do you think?
Visual torture. With Cach√ɬ© Michael Haneke has created a film for those with tremendous concern about world politics, unarticulated guilt over their own remove√¢‚Ǩ¬¶ all those who are capable of maintaining a soft sheltered ease as they move through their days√¢‚Ǩ¬¶ in short, everyone who thinks they are paying attention. Like McEwan’s Novel Saturday, the film Cach√ɬ© seeks to enable the proud, educated and the lucky (those participants presently capable of engaging in the dream culture of Brit. Books and French film) to safely peek at Western culpability.
In fact many who engage – and who pay over ten dollars, nine pounds, or eight euros to sit in the darkness, still through this nightmare – have training in visual pattern recognition, narrative or psychology, and so find pleasure in their remarkable insightfulness as they decode the surface structures of the film. This audience is trained to “discover” a ‘hidden’ affair that is revealed to son but not to father, and a ‘hidden’ relationship between sons. Yet many in these world audiences will miss the sick and simple one liner of this film: the relationship between the difficult protagonist’s own responsibility for events and their own responsibility for present and growing global inequity.
Those who might benefit most from these insights wouldn√¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢t think of seeing the film — French Cinema isn√¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢t part of their culture. Those who will see this film will, in all likelihood. read it as individual but linked stories of guilt and complex human character and will perhaps comment on the power and peculiarities of visuals in society. Daniel Auteuil and Juliette Binoche are brilliant actors. Yet for those who can watch, they move with aching detail towards the possibility of the recognition of tragedy — of wasted, hidden lives removed from connection, understanding, affiliation and caring √¢‚Ǩ‚Äú our own.
Code Inconnu is no stinker although it is a head scratcher. Cach√ɬ© is similar in style and content, although it is more genre specific (thriller)… they are both pure Haneke. I advise you to have another look at Code and wait 48 hours after the movie before you decide if you like it or not