HIDDEN : frome CINEASTE

Cache

by Christopher Sharrett

Michael Haneke's latest film Hidden, as its evocative title suggests, is concerned with suppression—in this case, the suppression of history. Hidden and Time of the Wolf (2002), Haneke's previous film which focused on the easy collapse of a tenuous social order in the aftermath of an unnamed apocalyptic event, are meant to be viewed as the filmmaker's ‘post-9/11' works. As many nations—especially the U.S. in the wake of September, 2001—ask ‘Why us?' Hidden suggests that such questions are either naïve or disingenuous, rooted in the profound denial of moral responsibility related to colonialism. An adept student of psychology, Haneke produces in Hidden a work that rescues the belief of the personal as political from overused banality—doing so through a microcosmic representation of the political unconscious of the colonialist, imperialist mindset.

Georges (Daniel Auteuil) and his wife Anne (Juliette Binoche) are a comfortable bourgeois couple representative of the contemporary French intelligentsia. Georges hosts and produces a TV literary chat show where his guests glibly discuss the merits of Rimbaud (Georges edits one show for being “too theoretical”). Anne works for a publisher, managing in-store book parties where wine-and-cheese-consuming culture vultures argue Baudrillard. Georges and Anne own a chic townhouse that is a model of upscale make-over toniness, its smartly appointed dining room neatly integrated within a large library, which shows less their erudition than the bourgeois appropriation and administration of the entirety of Western culture—a Haneke preoccupation. A sketched-out rendering of the same bookshelves appears as the backdrop to Georges's TV show, as if to assure his viewers that they are in the right place. He and his smug guests know whereof they speak as the ‘experts' on a culture, which, in the current context, has become nothing but a commodity to be brandished by a privileged class.

But Georges and Anne find their complacent lives disrupted by a series of videocassettes delivered to their home. Each is wrapped in white paper with a crude, childlike yet gruesome drawing—one showing a face bleeding from the mouth, another a decapitated chicken. The cassettes appear to be surveillance tapes showing the façade of the couple's home, and the comings and goings of Georges, Anne, and their young son Pierrot (Lester Makedonsky).

The film opens with an image of their home against which Haneke's emblematic diminutive titles slowly unroll. At first we assume the image is nothing more than the director's establishing shot, until the image cuts to Georges on the street, trying to discern the location of the hidden camera. An abrupt cut takes us back to the same image of the house as the tape shifts into ‘rewind' on a VCR while Georges and Anne ponder what's going on. Haneke, a veteran theater and television director, shows his preoccupation with media less as a symbol of postmodern alienation than simply a device of deception that disgorges truth, an important notion during a time when the political documentary has taken on a key role in challenging an unbridled period of reaction in U.S. politics.

Georges finds two of the videotapes especially disturbing—one is a rather bland traveling shot of a Parisian street, another is of the fieldstone farmhouse where Georges spent his boyhood. The images, especially the latter, begin to haunt his dreamlife. As Georges takes on the role of private eye, he protests to his wife that the police will refuse them help since no crime has been committed. He also reveals that he possibly knows the identity of the person watching them—knowledge he refuses to share with her. This sets Anne into a rage; she accuses Georges of distrusting her, of concealing secrets even as their lives may be threatened. Her anxiety is telling since, as Georges observes, nothing has happened to them. Georges could have better finessed the moment by assuring Anne that he is only trying to protect her, and that he will soon reveal the name of the suspect. As his responses become feebler, Anne's anger intensifies, presenting a key notion of the film: the emptiness and deceit of bourgeois married life, with its hidden layers of jealousy and resentment.

What is also hidden, of course, is the truth of the tapes, Georges's origins, and, ultimately, a concealed national history. As the narrative progresses, we sense that Georges knows more than he pretends, even as he assumes a bogus investigative mode. More importantly, he seems haunted by something the appearance of these bland tapes has dislodged. Yet the tapes show nothing revealing (no peeping-tom images) beyond the possibility that the videographer is trying to ‘case' the house—but then why deliver the tapes to the subject?

Using one of the tapes as a guide, Georges visits a rundown apartment building where he confronts Majid (Maurice Benachou). A paunchy, unprepossessing Algerian national, Majid was, we learn, a boyhood friend of Georges. When Georges angrily accuses Majid of harassing his family, Majid pleads innocence. Following Georges's departure, another tape is delivered to Georges and Anne, this one showing the confrontation at Majid's apartment, including Majid's anguished breakdown after Georges leaves. As Georges continues his investigations, he visits his stricken mother (Annie Girardot). After assuring her that ‘everybody's fine' in an archetypal moment of a son consoling his aging, infirm parent, Georges asks if she ever thinks of Majid. She brushes off the question, slightly bewildered. Why should one care about such long-ago events? The scene is crucial—Georges's mother answers for a nation and a civilization.

Majid and his parents were once employed by Georges's family. In October 1961, during the Algerian revolt against French control, French rightist forces led a pogrom against Arab populations living in France. The Algerian Front de Liberation Nationale (FLN) retaliated, igniting a bloody purge led by Paris chief of police Maurice Papon and paramilitary squads that resulted in the murder of at least two hundred Arabs, many of their bodies simply thrown in the Seine. The moment also produced the Organization Armée Secrète (OAS), a group of disgruntled army officers who continued the atrocities and went so far as attempting to assassinate De Gaulle for being ‘soft' on Algeria. The backstory not only gives Hidden its scope but also evokes the current era of racial profiling, persecution, and neofascism, with the ball very much in the U.S. court on matters of policing of the colonial domain.

Majid's parents were two of the “jigaboos” (the term is nonchalantly said to Georges during his inquiries) murdered during the period. Provided shelter by Georges's family, who intended to adopt him, Majid was abruptly shipped to an orphanage in response to Georges's jealous, ‘hidden' plot to banish Majid. That Georges appears to be ‘rediscovering' much of this is at the heart of the film. Rather, he seems to be pretending from the first not to remember much, not to know the source of the tapes—to be the ignorant innocent. When Georges appears at Majid's apartment for one final, accusatory confrontation, perhaps planned by Majid using the tapes as a lure, Majid suddenly cuts his own throat in a shocking moment recapitulating one of the drawings sent to Georges. There is the sense that Majid wants Georges as a witness to his death as he had been to the misery of his life, if from afar.

The scene makes clearer some of the film's assertions about Georges. His studied innocent, put-upon demeanor has authenticity only if one accepts the notion that the individual bears no responsibility for history, a very popular idea in the neoconservative West. Georges—a not-unappealing person—sees himself solely as victim precisely because his society encourages the notion of historical irresponsibility, represented very well in Georges's conversation with his well-heeled television producer, who is aware of the video harassment, is sympathetic, and seems to have not the slightest interest in whether or not Georges may have provoked it.

Questions remain as to the culprits of the narrative. Did Majid actually make all of the tapes? He protests his innocence in a manner that seems convincing. In his initial investigation, Georges cannot locate the position from which a video camera could have produced the image of his house seen on the tapes. Although the tapes recording the meetings of Majid and Georges were recorded from within Majid's apartment, was a hidden camera running continuously? If not, how did Majid know when Georges would arrive? Did he turn the camera on just as Georges appeared? These questions are deliberately unanswered, affirming, at least at one level, that the narrative is concerned with broad issues of guilt and paranoia, and a culture of surveillance created in large part by the West to protect its property. In the hands of the Other, surveillance, which in this narrative seems rather pointless and largely a metaphor for repressed guilt, is a deadly transgression, an act of ‘terrorism' (Georges uses the term), since it upsets, even in its slightness, the blasé routine of daily life, widening the cracks in the fragile façade of bourgeois existence.

After Majid's death, his young son (Walid Afkir) accosts Georges, blaming him for his father's death, caused, he says, by Georges's harassment. Georges is dumbfounded, seeing himself as the sole victim and suspicious of the son as a coconspirator.

No summary can capture the resonances of this densely textured film. The fear of the racial Other is at its heart, markedly so as we glimpse one of Georges' dreams, in which a young Majid, apparently seen from the viewpoint of the child Georges (point of view is a major philosophical issue of the film), decapitates a rooster in response to Georges' planned provocation, designed to discredit Majid. The blood splashes across Majid's face, foreshadowing (or recapitulating) one of the drawings sent to Georges's house. As the young Majid finishes the slaughter, he walks straight toward Georges/the camera, blackening the image, the child becoming a shadowy monster, suggesting that Georges's are the collective dreams of a societal bad conscience—a projection of anxiety and guilt rather than a depiction of the world. Indeed, the same may be said of the entire film—not that it is ‘only a dream,' but rather that Hidden concerns itself with the white bourgeoisie's preoccupation with itself, with the Other the obvious emblem of its unease.

The problem with race is represented in the type of offhand moment for which Haneke is noted. When Georges and Anne suddenly step into the street from behind a parked van, they are nearly hit by a young black man on a bicycle. Georges flies into a rage, accusing the man of negligence. The man takes his part, the episode about to turn to fisticuffs, until Anne intervenes with a measure of temperance—the young man was careless, but so was Georges, although Georges sees the street as his , a response unnecessarily belligerent and smacking of racism. The moment also reestablishes gender as a theme.

The bicycle scene is as much about machismo as race, the two men perhaps capable of killing each other—not an overstatement in the case of Georges, fuming at this point that his privileges have been violated at various levels—until Anne offers what is an obvious, easily-attained moment of sanity. The couple proceeds to their car, which Georges opens with a remote beeper—now standard issue for the middle class. As they shut out the world in the hermetically-sealed interior of their pricey, spotless vehicle, the small episode becomes one of many underscoring the disparities between rich and poor, black and white, on the ‘globalized' scene.

Class is spontaneously conjoined to race in these images and the rest of the narrative. Majid's squalid apartment building stands in marked contrast to the stylish, even splendid, townhouse and various accoutrements of Georges and Anne. The point is reestablished as Georges ponders his problems at his desk, his wide-screen TV used as background media wallpaper showing the latest Iraq atrocities and the Palestine situation. (These moments help make Hidden the most explicitly political of Haneke's films.) But the images go unnoticed by Georges and Anne, who carry on a discussion about their current travails oblivious to the exterior world, unconcerned about their connections to it, which in fact are absolutely central to their problems.

The several secondary themes of this film are intelligently integrated, yet Haneke wisely refrains from connecting all the dots. In one episode, Georges and Anne's teenage son Pierrot is missing. Although he is absent only a short time, the couple panics, imagining the worst atrocities in the context of the (rather innocuous) tape deliveries. It turns out that Pierrot, who is insolent but no more so than many teenage boys, was merely staying overnight with a neighbor. Pierrot withdraws into his room, adorned with Eminem posters and other paraphernalia of the vapid, corporatized youth culture, offering a rebellion that is no rebellion at all and that siphons off the adversarial energies of the young. Pierrot's anger, which seems barely contained at some moments, has no outlet in such a culture. Anne's attempt to engage him in conversation produces only a strange expression of resentment over Anne's too-frequent contacts with her employer (Bernard Le Coq). The film introduces incestuous desire as well as simple child neglect.

Anne doesn't seem to be having an affair with her boss, but Pierrot's complaint forces us to revisit earlier dinner table scenes, where Anne and Georges entertain guests with prototypical silly banter. Haneke's shot/countershot scheme suggests the tension in this otherwise banal moment, conveying both mutual seduction and mutual contempt. Pierrot, then, seems a kind of chorus to his dysfunctional family (and yet Haneke's construction of his characters makes us reflect on the uselessness of the term—what precisely is a functional family if one is willing to examine prevailing social/ideological assumptions?).

Following his final confrontation with Majid's bereaved and angry son, Georges returns home, feeling the matter is settled. He takes sleeping pills, and crawls naked into the cocoon of his shaded bedroom for a nap. An image of his childhood farmhouse reappears, showing young Majid taken, screaming, to his destitute future. What follows is an oblique but haunting final shot not unlike the images of the empty, indifferent landscape at the end of Time of the Wolf . We see the front steps of Pierrot's school filmed with a telephoto lens, an image that seems to recreate almost exactly an earlier shot of Georges picking up us son. (The school has functioned in the film as a site of regimentation and competition; we don't see Pierrot in class, but practicing endlessly with his swimming team.) The students come and go, some picked up by their parents. It is difficult to discern the precise nature of all the activity, but among the young people, it seems that Majid's son and Pierrot are having a rendezvous for some undisclosed purpose. If so, what are they up to? As important a question has to do with whether we are seeing another video image shot by an offscreen observer or whether we are seeing the director's point of view.

At several moments in the film it appears that Pierrot may be the real culprit, attempting to destroy his alternately doting and neglectful parents, whose monstrousness he perceives however well-protected their liberal exterior. Then Majid's son seems to be the perpetrator. The young generation trying to destroy the old would seem a nice but perhaps too easy denouement. The more central questions may be: Is Georges really a cruel racist? Is the son responsible for the sins of the father? Is each generation guilty of the crimes of the past? Such questions have been asked (and dodged) for decades by people in the U.S. in regard to the issue of slavery and its legacy. Georges's utter refusal to show sympathetic interest for Majid (while plagued by dreams that belie his indifferent demeanor), his mother's dismissal of Georges's questions (which are more about his own self-protection than interrogation of the past), and the failure of anyone in Georges's circle (with the exception of Pierrot) to connect meaningfully with anyone of color answers the questions well enough.

It seems that one can walk away from this film with one essential conclusion: Haneke has shattered the barrier between self and other, even as the West again attempts with a vengeance to recreate line-in-the-sand demarcations. As Bush would have it, ‘You are either with us or with the terrorists.' A merely rudimentary knowledge of history reveals such side-choosing as an easy job only for the most vicious and dull-witted.

In Hidden , Michael Haneke again shows his kinship with cinematic modernism—Bergman's Shame and Godard's Weekend would seem the precursors to both Time of the Wolf and Hidden . Like Bergman, Haneke finds consolations in Western culture, but, more political than Bergman, he is extremely skeptical of the civilization that produced it. Haneke, finally, expresses skepticism toward the culture itself—represented in the portrayal of classical music in the hands of the terribly self-destructive Erika in The Piano Teacher , and Georges's C-SPAN-like chat show in Hidden . (It is noteworthy that Hidden is one of the few of his major works without any trace of classical music, as if the director has given up on that consolation). Haneke is the legitimate heir to the modernists by showing insistently the utter fragility of Western society, its instability based on its unprincipled core. In its restrained majesty, Hidden offers an exploration of Western political assumptions, resulting in an enormously effective corrective for what dominant culture tells us as it rapidly erases history and sane discourse.




from: http://www.cineaste.com/Cache%20Review.htm