Caché

Caché turns out to be even better than I expected, better than the critics must have said (I avoided reading any reviews but I promise to get around to it one of these days), better still considered in context with Michael Haneke's other films: 7th Continent, Piano Teacher, Funny Games, Code Unknown, Benny's Video, Time of the Wolf.

Caché, in which a family receives mysterious videotapes to show they are under surveillance,  legitimately could be analyzed as a movie of:

voyeurism
filmgoing
racism
political turmoil
marriage
sexism
class struggle
coming of age
reality versus dreams
a world where simulation replaces reality
mystery
suspense

I could even imagine a discussion on the purpose of literature as depicted in this film, given that the main character reviews books on a television show.

And so forth.  It features Haneke's crisp and meticulous (meticulously Austrian?) filmmaking style.  After a fashion, Haneke might be considered the 21st century answer to Alfred Hitchcock.  (The Piano Teacher would be his Marnie and Time of the Wolf his Birds.  More than one could be his Psycho.)

I particularly like the fact that one watches this movie questioning every step of the way, reformulating an opinion or theory scene by scene, reshaping the mystery as you go, like an endlessly unfolding crossword puzzle.  The more you fill in the blanks, the more there is to do, and yet there is satisfaction in having completed each step...

In one scene, the wife, distraught by the turns of events in her family, has coffee with a friend, an adult male for whom there is obviously some attraction.  They embrace in the bistro, and one immediately assumes that this event may be secretly observed, videotaped, and used against her.  That's what would happen in a typical Hollywood movie, after all.  Indeed, when her son disappears overnight and returns angry at his mother, the reasons are left unexplained.  There is never the revelation that he saw a tape of her embracing the family friend, although he taunts her with the man's name.  There is never any evidence that a tape was made at all.

Caché is one of those movies that ends and makes you shout, "No!" You're not ready, not yet.  It's too soon.  We haven't finished piecing it together.  The final shot is one of great ambiguity.  It was only much later, on second viewing, that I realized what characters were shown in the distance.  At first, it appears to be just another long shot, a random voyeuristic view outside a school. 

The ellipses may be many, but nothing is random.  Few movies are so satisfying and engrossing, especially when so much has been carefully left out of the picture.