Cache (2005)

Directed by: Michael Hanake
Starring: Daniel Auteuil, Juliette Binoche

***

The films of Michael Hanake that I've seen has swelled to two now after watching Cache (Hidden). After much praise for his original version of Funny Games, I'm disappointed to say I don't hold the same admiration for Cache, however, I appreciate it and like aspects of it for the same reasons I found Funny Games to be such a perfectly made movie.

The emptiness and subtely of Cache did work, and while I really loved the emptiness, it was the subtlety that was lost on me. The story surrounds the mystery of tapes being left on the doorstep of Georges and Anne Laurent's home. Some of the tapes appear to be surveillance of their home, others are more mysterious. The film explores the basic questions of who, what and why and to a certain extent, none of these questions are really answered in the detail we're set up to want. Yes, there is a possible who which brought with it an obvious why but something as simple as a person's denial is all that's necessary to keep the audience guessing well after the end credits scroll. For me, this left me disappointed. The lack of closure for all but one character (a character who's closure seemed extremely unmotivated to me) was hard to accept.

Cache does leave you thinking about the character's lives beyond what you learn in the film, something that worked and I loved about Funny Games. Flashbacks/dreams provide a bit of reference to the characters past but this was an aspect of the film that I found extremely weak and ineffective. Even though I was frustrated by the mystery of the story, I would have preferred even more mystery I think had it meant the flashbacks were left out of the film. They felt out of context and seperate from the ongoing emptiness that exsisted not only on screen but in my gut as I watched.

Having heard positive things about Cache and having loved Funny Games, I had very high hopes for this film and for future films of Michael Hanake such as Benny's Video and The White Ribbon. Cache did nothing but increase my respect for Hanake as a filmmaker. I appreciate that he has chosen to be a filmmaker rather than a storyteller of sorts. In other words, there's nothing Kurosawa or Eastwood-like in his films, there isn't always a what's going to happen next feeling to his films, especially here with Cache. There's very little happening but Hanake is patient enough to dupe his audience into thinking something is happening, kind of the way his character's are perhaps making something out of nothing. What if Georges and Anne never investigated the origin of these tapes?

I'm not sure Hanake makes movies for entertainment purposes and I also suspect that he doesn't expect his audience to do much revisiting. However, my reaction after Funny Games was that I wanted to start it over immediately just to study what he'd done. I didn't have that reaction to Cache and the overly subtle story that the film employs didn't having me longing to go back to it either so thus I was left with a film that I could appreciate but didn't necessarily enjoy or want to study. Without those two things, Cache ended up being another well made film, but not a whole lot more.