Just back from Michael Haneke's Cache, at Tinseltown.

A year or two ago, I rented Haneke's Piano Teacher, starring Isabelle Huppert, with the idea that I was renting a black kink-themed comedy. What I saw instead, first with shock, then with mounting admiration, was a psychologically nuanced portrait of an obsessive personality, an elegantly directed modern tragedy on a par with Coetzee's Disgrace, or Richter's Baader-Meinhof paintings.

Cache moves deliberately slowly; many scenes are either visually static, or unroll in "real" viewing time, then roll back, alerting you to the static image's status as a pre-recorded thing. It's like watching an interlinked series of moving art photographs; at many points, I felt as if I was watching the before and after of a Jeff Wall picture.

Cinema hardly ever triggers an "art response" in me -- I almost always watch it as illustrated narrative, with an eye toward plot development, dialogue, etc., and less frequently for image-composition or cinematography. But Cache's steady, relentless juxtaposition of static and mobile scenes, coupled with its lack of a musical soundtrack, amazing staging and lighting, and the rich performances of Juliette Binoche and Daniel Auteuil, prompted my close attention.

Aspiring photographers of people can learn a lot from how Haneke frames even his incidental players -- Auteuil's character's bedridden mother; the son of the Algerian boy she once tried to adopt as a young woman -- with a gaze both tender -- in the sense of "showing each character off" at his or her best, by not reflexively prejudging them -- and dispassionate, in that Haneke treats both psychopaths and innocents with equal lack of prejudgement. This has led a lot of critics to label him "cold" or "dispassionate" or "existentialist," epithets that typically get slapped on anyone who's unafraid to make their audience really work at identifying what makes their characters tick. I prefer to think of Haneke as an artist like Goya, Manet, Wall, or, for that matter, Ian McEwen: creators who do their subjects, and audiences, the courtesy of witholding their own opinions of their characters.
- posted by cjb @ 9:20 PM