Cache – dir.Michael Haneke, 2005

Cache is a superbly unsettling film and stirs in the viewer an explicit sense of discomfort and confusion. The very theme of the film, voyeurism, is a practice human beings deplore as victims, and yet are guilty of, in the very action of watching this film. Similarly, the notion of blurred innocence with guilt is an affliction we come to surmise of the protagonist Georges (Daniel Auteuil).  Georges, who has recently received some primarily nonthreatening yet suspicious surveillance tapes showing the exterior to his Parisian home, eventually associates the source of the threat with a childhood incident.  Georges’ wife Anne (Juliette Binoche), confused by the tapes and the accompanying crude crayon scribbles, is both a passive observer and yet quietly threatened by this domestic disturbance.  Watching the events unfold, the subject of the threats, it transpires, is her husband.  Haneke plunges the viewer into the dark with the opening scene.  Are we watching a still or a moving image?  Who is filming, victim or perpetrator? We are from the onset unclear of where the malevolence lies. Surely though, to warrant such animosity Georges must be guilty, but of what?  Before purging his soul to an unsuspecting Anne, Georges tracks down the conditional culprit.  One could read the film, and the terrible sadness at the heart, as an application to approach the French guilt for the Paris massacre of 1961.  Indeed Georges’ bourgeois persona, most definitely receives a little light ridicule, if only in dichotomising his intellectual pomp with the tragedy and asceticism of the Algerian Majid (Maurice Benichou).  This film however is not wholly concerned with retribution, for neither Mijad nor Georges is offered any comfort or replenishment from either’s predicament.  The end subtly induces the plot to hang on, the final scene adding another layer of complexity to the story.  Ultimately the viewer  does not feel to have found any moralistic culmination or otherwise to the story. Cache is a little too enigmatic and harbours too much uncertainty to be a political stance. It is a little too complex, fragile, and loaded to be an out and out thriller.  The story Haneke weaves is a murkier narrative than most, combined with clever scenes that we witness fast-forward, rewind, fast-forward, at a giddying pace.  The viewer becomes the eyes of Georges, someone desperately searching for clues, pointers, anything, whilst truly anxious and afraid.  Training our astuteness for the one final clue that could just as easily slip past as the credits roll.   Georges’ guilt is ostensibly born from the actions of human weakness. It is the consequences of his actions that we are asked to judge. The questions stack up as the sprawling tragic story unveils, for all the answers to ultimately remain hidden.

★★★★★

2 Days in Paris – dir.Julie Delpy, 2007

Though this film will inevitably draw comparisons to Before Sunset, same girl, same city, it’s an original in its own right.  The film zings along endearingly, largely due to its own self-conscious parodying of a light French farce.  French lady, Marion (Julie Delpy), and her American boyfriend Jack (Adam Goldberg), have come to Paris for two nights, where they are to stay in Marion’s flat, on the floor above her enfants terribles type parents.  Jack is a little uptight, he’s a New Yorker don’t you know, so whilst he preoccupies himself with the pitfalls of hypochondria, Marion takes off her spectacles and explores the possibility of romantically moving on from this quirky foreigner who has come along, seemingly  to just humiliate and isolate himself from the footloose Parisians at every available opportunity.  Jack gets threatened when Marion’s exes crop up out of flower stalls from nowhere, he gets a little paranoid when he interprets some questionable French text messages that he sneakily reads on her phone. ‘Paris is hell!’ Jack declares as they break up on the banks of the Seine. A quip to Sartre perhaps, or as it transpires later, he just stayed up watching ‘M’ all night. The strengths of this film are most definitely in the credulity of the relationship that we witness unravel.  Jack is a tattooed totem of neurosis who finds himself out of depth with the laissez faire wooziness of Marion’s family, friends and exes.  Marion, who we are primarily to believe is  cooler and calmer than her boyfriend, her self offers a glimpse of amusing hypochondria.  Convincing herself at a party, that she has had an allergic reaction to some muscles. But perhaps her anxieties run even deeper than that, she is afraid, she tells Jack, of being with just one person for the rest of her life. He accuses her of being a squirrel, collecting men like nuts to have for winter. This film is at its weakest and most disjointed with scenes that seem inserted to politically punctuate the plot, such as Jack sending a group of Bush voting American rednecks the wrong way round Paris.  The film’s successes lies mostly with the fluidity and likability of the performances.  In particular Goldberg’s, whose stand out is the metro scene, where he comically attempts to ward off a strange little man, by casting stern animated faces at him, well at least it made him forget about the threat of terrorism for a while, George Bush, his sinuses, his headaches…

★★★★☆ 

Before Sunset – dir.Richard Linklater, 2004

I like this film so immensely because of how it ends. It’s a Kaiser Soze-type humdinger of a thing.  Yet when you see it, so gentle and subtle is it, that it could easily pass you by, which is a testament to both the script and the acting.  The film dissolves, like sherbet on the tongue.  It so perfectly ends, that I wonder how a film and its prequel (Before Sunrise) could precede it.  Thankfully the film itself is filled with similarly glorious moments. In the back of a taxi, Celine (Julie Delpy) raises her hand to affectionately touch Jesse (Hawke), who mid rant and sitting slightly forward, is none the wiser, Celine thinks twice though, and swiftly retracts the gesture, putting her arm back down again.  It seems such a strange action to witness and yet is a perfectly beautiful depiction of amorous trepidation and neurosis, and from then on we read Celine entirely more clearly.  We feel sorry for Jesse not knowing that for a moment there she wanted to be tender. The film itself is a testimony to what is not done, and what hasn’t happened.  The two never successfully reunited ten years before, and though there are frissons between the two in Paris, they are not acted on, as Jesse is married, it would have been too crass and torrid to dirty this fine romance with betrayal.  The film is about Jesse’s moment with Celine, it is hurried, he has a plane to catch; a metaphor perhaps for the distance in time and space between them and a hark back to their first meeting on a train. Their relationship is a pacing fleeting one, never unhurried, never leisurely.  The element of time adds restlessness and desperation, they only have so long to say or not say everything they have wanted to for years. Both, at points, in between long soliloquies about their lives spent, find it difficult not to orally buckle under the pressure. The film is a private moment played out in a public space, the streets of Paris, until it finally becomes a private one, Celine’s flat, where she, in song, admits that it was always Jesse. The Parisian sun seems to make Celine glow like some golden statue, she hasn’t changed Jesse says, maybe a little thinner, but you know she turned out exactly how he had hoped her to.  Jesse had better stop musing over her or he’s going to miss that Plane.  The most agonizing part of their story is when this pair, with no means of contact, recounts how close they were to meeting again all along.  Both lived in New York City for a while at the same time. Jesse on the way to his wedding, to what would be a loveless marriage, thought he saw her once.  Did he or didn’t he? Was it a tormenting apparition to cold feet or a tantalising coincidence?  She used to live near there she tells him. What is excruciating becomes the most romantic thing of all, but only because they found each other again.  If they hadn’t it would have been another saddest story in the world.

★★★★★