Beyond the Multiplex

The perfect cinematic antidote to holiday cheer, and a batch of DVD gift ideas for last-minute shoppers. Plus: Do Brosnan and Kinnear really go gay in "The Matador"?

By Andrew O'Hehir

Read more: Andrew O'Hehir, Movies, Movie Reviews, Arts & Entertainment, Reviews, Beyond the Multiplex

Dec. 22, 2005 | Ho ho ho! Let's pour some vegan eggnog, gather around the nonsectarian yule-type log in our poofy snowman sweaters, and talk about movies that rip the pulsing heart right out of our hypocritical bourgeois existence! Well, anyway, we're going to talk about Michael Haneke's "Caché (Hidden)," which is indeed a brilliantly constructed film and one of the year's major Euro-imports, but it also qualifies as the oddest Christmas-week release I can remember. I mean, I write this column -- I'm all in favor of films that bum people out, fill us with existential despair, and force us to challenge our overconfident conceptions of our lives -- and "Caché" left me scared and unsettled for a whole day afterward. So, you know, happy holidays! What useless object are you buying your spouse for Christmas while the poor children of the world suffer in poverty, ignorance and filth?

On a cheerier note (if only because no other direction is possible), we've got an uneven, amoral and thoroughly inappropriate comedy, I guess, about the friendship between a dorky American businessman and a debauched professional assassin. I saw "The Matador" with someone who really hated it, and she's probably right. It's juvenile, sloppy and anchored by one of Pierce Brosnan's now-patented profoundly insincere post-Bond performances. All of which is to say that if I see it again, it had better be in the company of a few selected male friends, where we can admit to kind of liking it. Finally, I have last-second gift ideas! I keep meaning to do a column of DVD news and reviews, and this isn't it, but appended herein is a list of some of the year's best new discs, especially the ones your film-geek friends don't have yet or even know about.

"Caché (Hidden)": Joseph Conrad meets David Lynch in a neighborhood not unlike yours and mine
Austrian director Michael Haneke, who's been making movies in France since the late '90s, remains relatively unknown in the United States. His only significant foray onto our shores came with the S/M sex drama "The Piano Teacher," which also won the 2001 grand prize at Cannes. Across the pond, Haneke is a mightily controversial cultural figure, defended by some as a great and demanding artist, attacked by others as a sensationalist and a pornographer.

I've long been on the fence about Haneke, and I've cannily avoided writing about him until now. At first glance, his deliberately confrontational films, often about psychological and sexual violence, seem to belong to the current generation of French cinema, which has produced such memorable assaults of arty nihilism as Gaspar Noé's "Irreversible," Claire Denis' "Trouble Every Day" and Catherine Breillat's "Romance." (I'm not being judgmental; I mostly like arty nihilism.) But Haneke's no brash experimentalist; he's a 63-year-old professional filmmaker whose work is never show-offy, driven by visual gamesmanship or deliberately obscure. If he's trying to push our buttons, he's doing so firmly in the allegorical, narrative tradition of old-school European film. (His first film was made for Austrian television in 1976.)

That's one way of saying that anyone who thinks that Haneke's new "Caché," a drama about an upper-middle-class Parisian family, is some kind of commercial sellout is just being an idiot. There's no sex in the film, and only one, very brief, incident of violence (although that will certainly shock you). What's so unsettling about "Caché" is the sense that its essential question is never quite asked and certainly not answered: At what cost to others do "we" -- we in the middle-class West, in places like Paris and New York and San Francisco and London and Dallas -- lead our normal lives and raise our children and read interesting books? How fragile are those safe and normal lives? Are they endangered by others, or is the danger found inside?

As Georges (Daniel Auteuil), the host of a brainy TV talk show, explains to his aging mother (Annie Girardot, a Haneke regular), there isn't much to say about his life with wife Anne (Juliette Binoche) and their son, Pierrot (Lester Makedonsky). They're both too busy with work, Pierrot is doing OK at school and great on the swim team -- not much else to report. Actually, there is. Georges doesn't tell Mom that someone's been leaving them videotapes, shot outside their house on a pleasant Paris street. Just an hour or so of their comings and goings, delivered to the door right after completion, wrapped in childlike drawings that get progressively more ominous: a boy with a crew cut bleeding from the mouth, a decapitated rooster, a man with his throat cut.

Next page: Who's that little boy in the corner?