FILM: Cache

Saw Cache last night. It's a French film, starring Juliette Binoche and Daniel Auteuil.

There were mixed opinions on the film. Personally I did not find Cache powerful. So, my somewhat lukewarm response here and now.

The film opens with a still long take of the cozy, middle-class home of Anne (Binoche) and Georges (Auteuil) Laurent. Nothing seems to happen, the credits run across the screen in small white letters. You watch little banal scene. Nothing dramatic.

Then you hear the voices of Binoche and Auteuil. The screen runs in a fast-forward and you realised you are shown the video-recording the Laurents received at their door-step.

It's this sense of unease that I like about the film. You do not know what exactly you are looking at. The unknowing quality charge the scenes.

I wasn't allowed to sit back passively. The director keeps throwing me into the point of view of the video-recording (and by implication, the POV of the Laurents as they watch the video, and the POV of the mysterious person who taped the scenes.)

There's a kind of complicity via voyeurism. I think. Need to think about this a little more, but I don't think I will.

In the most evocative scene, Majid tells Georges Laurent that he wants Laurent to be here, and immediately slashed his own throat. It's an aggressive suicide, bearing the full blunt of Majid's self-annihilation on Laurent.

But that's about it. WW calls it an "edge of the seat" experience, although my butt very comfortably sank into the cushion. Hitchcock used similar still long takes technique in Rope and Rear Window to greater effect.

So it's not that great. But it's not that bad either.