Director – Michael Haneke – 2005 – Austria, France, Germany – Cert.15 – 117m
***1/2
Covertly delivered VHS videotapes suggest to an upper middle class family that they are being watched, and begin to tease out guilt for an incident in the husband’s past – the closing film of Complicit: A Michael Haneke Retrospective, in UK cinemas from Friday, June 20th
A lengthy, locked-off camera shot of a street. A woman (Juliette Binoche) leaves the house through a full body height metal gate that seems to serve a security function, although the street seems largely quiet and unremarkable. Then the image starts to rewind in the manner of a videotape; what we are watching is a recording in the videotape player of a couple Georges and Anne Laurent (Daniel Auteuil and Juliette Binoche), who are discussing its contents. The tape has been left outside their front door for reasons that are not immediately obvious and by person or persons unknown.
This opening shot is mirrored by another static shot at the end taken from outside the school of their son Pierrot (Lester Makedonsky) as pupils leave, in which… well, you’ll have to see for yourself, and director Haneke doesn’t make it easy to see what it is he wants you to see, so you’ll have to work at it… and even then, you may miss it. Not for nothing is this called Hidden.
This is only arguably a thriller, and if what you want to get out of the film is the identity of the sender of the tapes, the film offers several potential answers (including the possibility that Pierrot has something to do with it) but never definitely settles on any one of those answers. That’s really not what it is about, its interest lying rather with the couple, in particular the husband, and the issue of his guilt – what did he do?, how does he deal with it at this point in his life?
They are well-paid media types – he has a television talk show covering all manner of topical, cultural issues, she works at a book publisher – and are the sort to host dinner parties. The husband is tormented by strange dreams and memories, triggered in part by a second VHS which contains images of the farmhouse and courtyard where he grew up, of an Algerian boy killing a chicken with an axe. (The sequence seems to involve plunging an axe into a real live chicken.)
This is the boy that Georges’ parents were going to adopt, possibly because of collective guilt. Georges’ dialogue invokes the Paris Massacre of 1961 in which some 200 Algerians were drowned in the Seine. The child’s parents were not seen after that incident, so may have perished in it.
Although set in France, and drawing on French colonial history, the piece feels not so much a condemnation of French colonial crimes as of colonial crimes committed by the Western world in general. Perhaps that is, in part, because, even though many of his films have been made and set in France, the Austrian-born Haneke has also made films in set Austria and Germany and feels more like a European director than a specifically French one.
Subsequent videotapes show Georges a street in a less affluent banlieue, and take him to the door of a cheap flat accessed via a characterless corridor. “How did you find me?,” asks the astonished grown-up Majid (Maurice Bénichou from Time of the Wolf, Michael Haneke, 2003) and they talk in the flat, Georges defensive and accusatory, Majid by contrast surprisingly conciliatory in the circumstances.
Their conversation is shown from a specific camera position behind Georges with Majid facing camera, which will later turn up at Georges and Anne’s apartment on a further VHS. More visits to Majid’s reveals a son (Walid Afkir) who could have set the camera up or shot the tape covertly, but (like everyone else in the narrative) denies he was the one who shot it.
Regardless of who might be directly responsible for the footage, for this writer it evoked the word of Jesus from Luke 8:17: “For there is nothing hidden that will not be disclosed, and nothing concealed that will not be known or brought out into the open.” In the light of that, the film could be said to be about judgement, with past misdemeanours refusing to stay hidden but instead coming to light.
In addition, there are hints that Anne is more physically intimate than she should be with Pierre (Daniel Duval from Time of the Wolf, not to mention District 13: Ultimatum, Patrick Alessandrin, 2009), the husband of Mathillde (Nathalie Richard from After Love, Aleem Khan, 2020; Jeanne du Barry, Maïwenn, 2023; Everything Went Fine, François Ozon; 2021; Happy End, Michael Haneke, 2017; Never Let Me Go, Mark Romanek, 2010; Irma Vep, Olivier Assayas, 1996) who as a couple are Georges and Anne’s closest friends. They can be seen as two of the guests at a lengthy dinner party sequence fairly early on.
Whatever else Hidden can be accused of, Haneke certainly isn’t playing safe and repeating what he has done before. Yet, for me, these upper middle class media types totally fail to engage me on an emotional level in the way that the protagonists do in earlier Haneke outings including Benny’s Video (1992) and The Piano Teacher(2001), and for that matter in the later – and different again – The White Ribbon (2009). I hadn’t watched Hidden since its January 2006 UK release, and wondered if I would warm to it more than previously on seeing it 20 years later. But no, watching it again, I still felt about it much as I did at the time.
Hidden also stars Annie Giradot (from The Piano Teacher, Michael Haneke, 2001; Merci La Vie, Bertrand Blier, 1991; Rocco and His Brothers, Luchino Visconti, 1960) and Bernard Le Coq (from Joyeux Noel, Christian Caron, 2005).
Hidden (Caché) is the closing film of Complicit: A Michael Haneke Retrospective, out in cinemas in the UK on Friday, June 20th.
Retrospective Trailer: