2007 Program - Reviews, credits and stills 2007 Program - Reviews, credits and stills
Cast: Juliette Binoche, Daniel Auteuil
Hidden is Austrian filmmaker Michael Haneke's ninth feature film as writer/director. It is another of his features that demands much from the audience, least of all our undivided attention, and most of all, a willingness to be implicated in and indicted on the act of 'looking'. While it isn't as graphic or emotionally harrowing as his controversial 2001 film, The Piano Teacher, it is no less shocking. And while nowhere near as gruelling as family hostage film Funny Games (1997) it's still not a comfortable watch by any measure. It is replete with a palpable tension that you know won't leave until you walk it off after the final credits. Like Funny Games and the equally disturbing (and brilliant) Benny's Video (1992), Hidden is, as previously mentioned, a movie that interrogates us - the cinema going, TV watching, internet spying audience - about our compulsion of 'looking and watching'. Further, it reveals what can happen when that very act is used a weapon.
Great French actors, Daniel Auteil (The Good Son, The Girl On A Bridge) and Juliette Binoche (Three Colours Blue, Chocolat) are paired up for Hidden as middle class married couple Georges and Anne Laurent. Georges is the popular, very recognisable host of a TV talk show about books and literature, while Anne is an editor at a major publishing house. Their 12 year-old son Pierrot (Lester Makedonsky) is a boy who loves swimming and hanging out with his friends. While he is showing signs of pulling away from his parents, of asserting his independence, questioning their authority and so forth (as you do at that age), life for the Laurent family is pretty unremarkable and uneventful.
Until mysterious videotapes coupled with notes depicting crayon drawings of murder and mayhem start arriving in their mailbox. The tapes are at once mundane and disturbing, revealing that someone is filming/watching the Laurents, recording them from outside their home, and later from inside other places and spaces. It seems they (then as we learn, Georges) are being sent a message, but by whom and for what reason? This is the sombre game of Hidden, to solve these riddles but by the time the final credits roll -- over yet another static surveillance shot -- there are still a myriad of possibilities and conclusions.
Which may frustrate those who prefer their surveillance thrillers to come in neatly resolved Hollywood packages, such as Firewall, Harrison Ford's latest vehicle that also features a similar 'family being spied upon' story. But this is a Michael Haneke movie; to paint it as a game of 'hide and seek' would be to do it a disservice. Hidden is as far away from a Hollywood thriller as you can get these days, but no less engaging. The very title refers to not only the invisible camera person, but to a secret in Georges' past that he has hidden from his family - and the resulting guilt he is hiding from himself. This is a film about guilt; the denial individuals (and cultures) often invoke when refusing to deal with the ramifications of terrible actions.
If it sounds like an allegory for Australia's 'sorry' debate, you wouldn't be far off the mark. Hidden also refers to an event from France's past that collectively it has tried to forget, barely acknowledged and hardly reconciled, where hundreds of protestors demonstrating against the French government's occupation of and policy in Algeria, were injured and/or killed by police in Paris in 1961. This is the catalyst for the story, and Georges is the symbol for a denial specific to the Western way, a certain cultural forgetfulness symptomatic of modern day politics.
But the most compelling "character" of the film - its most brilliant quality - is the film medium itself. We are constantly having our perceptions challenged -- are we watching the film now or footage that has been filmed before? Haneke edits the surveillance tape footage so seamlessly into the body of the film, it's always a surprise when we finally pick the difference. It's as if the very film is a living breathing character of its own, talking to us, challenging us, questioning us while we are in the act of watching it. It's so smart its scary. If you thought the videotapes in The Ring were dangerous, wait till you see this.
That is what is so strong about Hidden. There are no bells and whistles surrounding the threat. No big loud sound effects cranked up to eleven; no scary monsters lurking around each corner. It's subtle, cryptic and quiet. The threat in Haneke's films lurk and dwell in the everyday: the choices we make and the way we deal with them. Life. And the overwhelming experience, while heady, is also genuinely sad.
One critic has already claimed Hidden to be "the first truly great film of the 21st century". That may well be. I haven't finished thinking about it yet. I do know that it is a great film on many levels. Enough for now.
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Near the end of Michelangelo Antonioni's classic European head-spinner Blowup protagonist Thomas (David Hemming) saunters through a public park and past a group of mimes on a tennis court. The mimes are only pretending to play but their game must exist in one reality or another because we clearly hear the sounds of their non-existent balls connecting with their non-existent rackets. Whether or not Thomas can also hear the phantom game taking place is another question altogether.
Watch very closely in Hidden because Austrian director Michael Haneke is clearly playing funny buggers. If Antonioni's tennis scene somehow crept into this movie one of Haneke's characters would film it on a camcorder; spliced together with other footage we would hear and see the balls but not know from whose perspective we were watching. Are we watching from Haneke's behind-the-lens perspective? Or are we watching from a character's perspective -- in front of one lens and behind another? Haneke cunningly toys with the relationship between form and meaning in Hidden, and that's only the tip of the iceberg.
The film's opening shot is almost numbing in its plainness: we watch a middle class home from street perspective as people, cars and bicycles move in and out of frame. Then odd things happen: two voices begin talking, fuzzy lines appear on the screen and the image rewinds. We're watching a video, at the same time as Georges (Daniel Auteuil) and Anne (Juliette Binoche). They found the tape on their doorstep and don't know who sent it. It won't be the last of them either because there's plenty more where that came from. Georges, a television book critic (yes, such a job existents in France), grows weary of helplessly pacing around and becomes convinced that the only person who could be behind this obscene prank is somebody buried deep in his past, whose very name espouses a flood of unresolved feelings.
Indicative of his film's twisted genius Haneke returns to the unspectacular opening shot later on and revs its esoteric properties into a higher, mind-mulching gear. This time Georges and Anne walk right by the (obviously undisguised) camera which then twists and zooms to capture their stride. They are impossibly oblivious to its presence because it is clearly no longer a part of their reality. That presents a pretty intriguing aberration: the camera has leaped from their world to ours, from Georges' to Haneke's. The space in between, if you'll pardon the academia, is what that fidgety word 'postmodernism' is all about.
Haneke's intensely high-toned direction pushes the plot forward with surgical precision and the story carries no dead weight. Georges, whose every bead of sweat is seized upon by Daniel Auteuil's expertly flabbergasted performance, swells into rage and fear as the parcels become more personalized. A child's picture of a chicken's neck dripping blood spurs a reoccurring nightmare about a moment in his youth in the company of a person he believes is now inexplicably intertwined with his tormenter. Georges strenuously vilifies himself at every turn and proclaims his undying innocence, but something about the way he moves insinuates darker and more sinister anxieties. Is he a victim of unprecedented torment, or guilty of something the film won't allow him to peacefully lament?
There is a fierce intellectualism seething in the air of Haneke's noodle-scratching odyssey, a bold and unique techno-thriller that clutches the concepts of voyeurism and surveillance by the balls and gives them a post-modern workout. Reading the plot by asking who-done-it is a legitimate question and Haneke caters for literal answers, but Hidden also works on much higher levels. If you're a movie goer who needs to have t's crossed and i's dotted the film's world cuts a razor sharp realism and follows its own logic scrupulously. The mystery of the video tapes is explained albeit in an audaciously clandestine way that kind of has to be seen to be believed - trouble is, unless you have a hawk's eye or happen to be looking at the right corner of the screen you may not even realize that the final shot twist has taken place (if you've seen the film and want more information about the final shot click here).
It is however Haneke's metaphoric and emblematical sensibilities that pushes Hidden into the realm of the senses, where it spins in a hyper-reality that seems at all times capable of folding in on itself, like a book that opens and closes from every corner and begins and ends on every page. In an interview with At the Movies Haneke suggested his film is about racism and xenophobia, and one particularly impassioned fan on the internet was convinced the film is a direct commentary on Western nation's involvement in the Iraqi conflict.
The truth could be either, neither or both. The best readings of Hidden depend on what each viewer brings to it and not vice versa -- the questions we ask are tantamount in comparison to the answers we expect. David Lynch is a great provocateur of symbolism in cinema and carries with him a neat array of sleights, but his realities almost always feel like hyper-realities, dreamscapes that have somehow impinged on daylight and natural clarity to create a wicked broth of interpretative possibilities and perception benders. Hidden, on the other hand, presents symbolism in a water right reality -- a reality that at once seems ours, theirs and somebody else's.
The film industry is crammed full of similar stories that ask us not to look too closely at the finer points. Hidden goes the other way, daring us to think and scrutinize and there is great satisfaction to be had from playing its game, the rewards like flushes of intellectual amphetamine. After seeing Hidden for the first time I walked around in a daze for hours, mumbling incoherently and feeling like a philosopher struggling to come to terms with a new variant of the chicken and the egg puzzle. It was like going to a gym where your mind and not your body gets the workout.
Hidden is a brilliant film - rich, taut, provocative and legitimately one of a kind. Haneke's thinking-man's thriller isn't just one of the best films of the month or the year: it deserves to be regarded in years to come as one of the finest films of the decade.
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