Movie Review – Caché (2005 – France)
Too much cleverness, not enough story
Subtlety in storytelling is a challenging art. Give your audience too much, and it becomes trite. Too little, and it’s confusing. Way too little, and it’s just annoying. Caché is an attempt to push that delicate balance to its limitation and—regrettably—it doesn't work. Confusing quickly morphs into boring, then into a sort of repressed rage at the storyteller and—by extension—the characters in this most pretentious of pictures.
Adding to the viewer's disconnect from the material is the at first intriguing idea that we often don’t know if we are watching "real" events inside the story, or a videotape of past events. As I said, "at first intriguing". It doesn’t hold up well when mined over and over again, and adds only a further sense of claustrophobia and alienation to an already-unsettling film experience.
Cache
Watch the trailer for Cache:
If it looks like they're sitting around doing nothing, you now understand the whole movie
I really disliked this movie, which I stuck with right through the ending—an ending even more overly-subtle than the rest of it. I saw this movie with two close friends, however, people I like and respect. One found it interesting but unsatisfying, the other really enjoyed it, so—as is always the case with reviews—this is only my opinion, yours may vary greatly. However, there are so many enjoyable, insightful, genuinely wonderful movies available that it seems wasteful to spend time on one as deeply flawed as this one.
Not recommended for anyone except perhaps the deeply masochistic.
Copyright © Roberta Lee 2012. All rights reserved.
(I am an artist and the author of the Suburban Sprawl series of novels as well as two nonfiction books. Find out more about my work at RobertaLeeArt.com.)
Genre: Drama, Art House & International, Mystery & Suspense
Rated: R
Running Time: 1 hr. 57 min.
Directed By: Michael Haneke
Written By: Michael Haneke
In Theaters: Dec 23, 2005 Limited
On DVD: Jun 27, 2006
Box Office: $3.5M
Distributed by: Sony Pictures Classics
Cast:
Daniel Auteuil - Georges
Juliette Binoche - Anne
Lester Makedonsky - Pierrot
Maurice Bénichou - Majid
Annie Girardot - Georges' Mother
Bernard Le Coq - Editor
