Coming to Terms with Cache

Cache is one of the most dissatisfying movies I’ve ever seen. The frustratingly long takes put me to sleep in my seat. What is even more irksome, however, is how the viewer is constantly deprived of seeing the off screen space and the reverse shot all the way through the end of the film. The off screen space never becomes on screen space, so we never learn who is seeing or shooting. Instead of becoming engrossed in the film, we become increasingly aware that there is a camera watching and recording. The constant, conscious awareness that there is a camera is precisely what is irritating.

I don’t believe that director Michael Haneke intended to stress the audience out in this manner without reason. As implied by the title (“cache" means hidden in French), many elements of the story are bound to be kept from us. For one, viewers are never entirely sure if the scene that is taking place is actually happening or whether it is simply a clip of one of the tapes sent by the mysterious stalker. The plot itself revolves around secrets: Georges keeps to himself that he was the reason Majid was sent away to an orphanage and prevented from receiving a solid education. He also doesn’t confide in his wife when he suspects that Majid is sending the messages and tapes. Anne has a secret of her own- that she has been meeting up with her friend Pierre for emotional consol and maybe also physical. Pierrot realizes Anne’s possible affair and keeps the knowledge locked up inside him, resulting in irrational behavior on his part. And of course, the biggest secret of all that is never found out- who is terrorizing the Laurent family? Clearly, the film is swarming with secrets, and by depriving viewers of off screen space and the reverse shot, Haneke takes the motif of secrets to a whole new level. In a way, putting the viewers in the place of the camera makes them feel as if they themselves are surveilling the Laurents. Perhaps we are the stalker? Of course, I don’t actually believe that this is what Haneke is implying, but perhaps the character we are meant to identify with is actually the mysterious stalker.

Although I did not particularly enjoy this movie, I left the screening with a desire to watch it again. There were so many unanswered questions lurking on my mind that make me want to sit through it one more time to see if I pick up on any clues that I may have missed the first time around. In this respect, it seems that Haneke’s unconventional approach to cinematography is effective after all.

Generally, the way a movie moves forward is through shot-reverse-shot patterns (such as in conversations and point of view shots). We have been trained to think that when the camera moves, it is someone looking. In essence, there are two fields in every image: the field of the character (on screen) and the field in which he/she is being looked at (off screen). If the image is held long enough, we become aware that there isn’t really anybody looking; there is only a camera. Upon this realization, we fall out of the story and the realism that the fiction has created for us. In Cache, we question at many points throughout the film, “Who is seeing this?” Daniel Dayan suggests in his article “The Tudor-Code of Classical Cinema” that this is the point that we fall out of ideological effect of the film. This explains why I was not absorbed in the movie, and was left with so many questions at the end. However, I believe that although we may be faced with boredom and confusion upon watching it, the way that the off screen space is not revealed is actually effective for this particular film. Perhaps Haneke wanted the audience to be able to feel ignorant of a secret the way all the central characters do. Whatever the director’s intentions, the movie clearly would not have had close to the same mysterious effect if filmed in a different manner.