Home
sign up| features / film interview |
 content by: editor |
 hidden
 to access audio and video on collective you need real player.Daniel Auteuil is being watched. We see them everywhere – CCTV, webcams, camera phones – but when it comes to our reaction to the rapid proliferation of recorded visual information now produced on a minute-by-minute basis, ever get the feeling we’re all wearing shades? Somehow we tend to divorce ourselves from the reality that we’re constantly under surveillance. Then along comes a filmmaker as merciless as Michael Haneke and jams the evidence right into our faces.Hidden (Caché) follows a well-to-do French bourgeois couple, literary TV host Georges (Daniel Auteuil) and Anne (Juliette Binoche), living with their young son in supposed urban bliss. This comfortable existence is turned upside down when a series of videotapes filming the comings and goings outside their front door are left anonymously on their doorstep. These are followed by a series of childlike drawings of figures with their throats violently slashed. With the police powerless to intervene, Georges starts to piece together the mystery, leading to some disturbing revelations from his past.  Haneke, Austria’s most renowned – and notorious – filmmaker is a past master at skewering his characters and audience alike, turning their own voyeurism against them in the hugely unsettling Funny Games (1997) and dispassionately dissecting modern morality in films like Code Unknown (2000) and The Piano Teacher (2001). Here he returns to his favourite themes, but here more than ever his somewhat icy, intellectual approach appears to be at the service of more than a thesis. When Hidden cuts, people bleed. As Georges plays detective, he stirs up his own past guilt at the treatment of a young Algerian boy from his youth. Beyond the specific personal story that unravels, Haneke seems to be evoking a collective national guilt, given France’s turbulent history with Algeria, and how these wounds, crimes if you will, can still reverberate (as last year’s Paris riots clearly showed). Out of sight doesn’t necessarily mean out of mind.  All of which would be far less interesting if Hidden didn’t succeed as a brilliantly effective, unsettling thriller. Auteuil and Binoche are quietly superb, likewise veteran actor Maurice Bénichou, whose involvement in one of the most shockingly unexpected scenes in recent memory has audiences regularly gasp out loud. And just when it appears that Haneke has eschewed any conventional explanations, a final wide shot offers possible revelations for those who really look - the clues hidden in plain sight. For Haneke’s masterpiece, it couldn’t be any other way.
Leigh Singer
Hidden, on selected release 27 January 06.
 comments
Read members' comments related to this film.
comment by BernardMG
Mar 8, 2006
Personally I thought this film was hugely overhyped...I thought Haneke was playing with his audience, deliberately making the 'plot' meaningless as if to say: you need a rational explanation, but I'm not going to give you one. When Auteil's character takes refuge in a cinema from the reality of the event he has just witnessed, I thought this was Haneke's knowing comment on us, the audience.I came out of this film not somber as per the previous commentator, but smouldering - feeling I had been robbed of a couple of hours and a couple of quid.
comment by Spinky
Jan 30, 2006
I really want to see this - will probably go tomorrow night (so nobody post any spoilers until Wednesday!) - but I've already read that if you're not looking at a certain part of the screen towards the end, then you miss a big hint.
comment by Alastair Lee editor
Jan 30, 2006
i saw this at the weekend in a notting hill cinema and it struck me that the culture that this film was confronting was more likely to be present here than just about anywhere else in the UK. It was a solumn exit to the street i can tell you.A superb, unnerving thriller. The best i've seen in years. Just so effective and cleverly put together using the traditional tools of filmaking. i heartily recommend it. now i just need to work out exactly what happened.
|
 |
see also
 lff 05feature  the piano teacherdvd
related member reviews
code unknownby mike the piano teacher dvd by mattias
also on bbc.co.uk
books  books and comics archive Author interviews and reviews from 2002 to 2008. |
send to a friend
access 1000s of articles
