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Cache

Michael Haneke's gift is to take seemingly normal people and throw on huge monkey wrench into their lives and show how they react, not as monsters, superheroes or any other comic book cliche, but as regular people dealing with fate.  Cache is a very simple movie.  A family is tormented based on the actions of the father when he was only six.  The movie explores the feelings of a man who knows his childish selfishness caused another human being to live a somewhat unfulfilled life, while he went on to celebrity status, despite a life filled with mundane tasks and a relationship with his wife which can be described, at best as, tolerable.

Where Cache fails miserably was in it's placing celebrity status upon the main character.  His public is not at all what it is at home, and while that is the point, it takes away from the division between he and his stalker.  In the end, we are left with this empty feeling that this shell of a man, will life his life out as he always has, with the simplicity of daily chores and responsibilities being all that he has, yet his life is admired from afar as something spectacular.

Is Haneke telling us to enjoy or own lives and not to covet what others have?   If so, he nailed this aspect of human nature in Time of the Wolf, so why reexamine it?  There is also his political message, which may be lost on those who aren't French, but he has stated his movies should be adaptable to everyone.  We as Americans need only really look at our treatment of slaves and the subsequent treatment of blacks, even today, to understand this subtle message.  All this being said, it doesn't make for an entertaining film.  While thought provoking, his use of long still shots and silences get in the way of allowing for any flow, only helping in reminding us of the tediousness of every day life.

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