French Film Review: Hidden

This weekend, I went to see the French film Hidden (Caché), which is playing in the UK and Stateside. When I discovered it starred two of my favourite actors, Juliette Binoche and Daniel Auteuil, I knew I had to go. The Guardian reviewer called the film, directed by Michael Haneke, “one of the great films of this decade.” High praise indeed.

Hidden is intense, almost claustrophobic. It’s a political film, but its scope is not wide or all-encompassing. Rather, it tells a political story through a very small, familial lens. There are only a handful of characters in the film and most of the action takes place in the home of Georges (Auteuil) and Anne (Binoche). In brief, Auteuil plays the Parisian host of a literary TV show. He and his family begin to get videotapes, drawings and phone calls from an anonymous stalker who has them under surveillance.

Hidden is a very talky film. As I sat through the first 30 minutes, I kept wondering why it had such a strange feel to it. Then I realized there was no music. When the characters aren’t speaking, there is silence. There are a few scenes that shatter this silence and two of them are very disturbing – one involves a chicken getting its head cut off, which is extremely graphic and would cause the average member of PETA to pass out; the second I can’t reveal, but the New York Times described it as a “single short scene of violence [that] is among the most upsetting in a movie this year.” I can’t argue with that. As this extremely brief scene unfolded, almost every person in the theatre gasped in shock and a couple of people even screamed.

The Guardian review describes Hidden as “a parable for France's repressed memory of la nuit noire, the night of October 17 1961, when hundreds of Algerian demonstrators in Paris were beaten and killed by the police…It is about the prosperous west's fear and hatred of the Muslim world and those angry pauperised masses once under our colonial control, and over whose heads a new imperium is being negotiated in the Middle East and beyond.”

I didn’t find the political message to be heavy-handed, though someone who lives in France might feel otherwise. The film couldn’t be more timely – or perhaps prescient – given the riots in France last fall. But I don't want to give the wrong impression. This film is not like Munich. It's a political film that does not overtly engage in politics. We know that French and Algerian politics play a part, but what we see on the screen is a man, played brilliantly by Auteuil, who is grappling with his own conscience. Nothing could be more personal than that.