Caché, directed by Michael Haneke, is a French mystery suspense film in which fifty-year-old Georges Laurent (played by Daniel Auteuil) and his spouse Anne (played by Juliette Binoche) receive unsolicited surveillance videotapes of their Paris townhouse. The contents are unremarkable, but tapes keep piling up on their doorstep, and Anne receives telephone calls from a man demanding to speak to her husband but not identifying himself. From the angle of the photographic point of origin, there is only one apartment from which the tapes could be made--the residence of a Majid (played by Maurice Bénichou) and his son (played by Walid Afkir). Naturally, the tension level increases as the harassment continues, especially when tapes are wrapped in crude drawings--one of a man with blood coming out of his mouth, the other of a decapitated, bleeding rooster. One day, their twelve-year-old son Pierrot (played by Lester Makedonsky), who has earlier received a postcard with one of the drawings, fails to come home for the night, so they report the matter to the police, who barge into Majid's apartment and arrest both occupants on a charge of suspected kidnapping. When Pierrot appears the following morning, the Laurents are relieved; meanwhile, Majid and his son are released from custody. Why would Majid take the trouble to engage in harassment? Georges has nightmares, recalling a time when he was six and his parents tried to adopt an orphaned Algerian boy named Majid. Opposed to the adoption, Georges tricked Majid into chopping off the head of a rooster so that he could tell his parents that he acted in a barbaric manner. As a result, the adoption ended, and Majid went to live in orphanages until he reached the legal age to go out on his own. Clearly, Majid's current harassment is payback, but Georges refuses at first to reveal his knowledge of Majid to his wife. One day, Majid summons Georges to his apartment and slits his throat. Georges then feels remorse but tries to resume normal activities when Majid's son appears at his workplace, demanding to talk to him. When they repair to the men's washroom, Georges tries to threaten him with unpleasant consequences for any future harassment, but the latter replies that he did not engage in the tape harassment; he just wants to know how he will react to Majid's death, and he informs Georges that he has now fulfilled his curiosity. In the final scene, a car is outside Pierrot's school as the children leave for the day. Pierrot does not get into the car, leaving filmviewers bewildered about the apparent stalker. The point of the film is to demonstrate that arrogant French have collectively orphaned many poor Algerians and others from their former colonies, who live with so much discrimination in contemporary France that there should be no surprise about the riots of November 2005. A mid-film scene where Georges rudely castigates a polite bicyclist from a former African colony states the theme quite eloquently. Caché's allegory, thus, proves to have been very prescient indeed. Accordingly, the Political Film Society has nominated Caché as best film on human rights of 2005. MH
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