Cache, a psychological thriller which offers political and social commentary, delivered on its promise. It bothered me. It drew me in. It made me think. It made me anxious. And, hurrah, it made me want to write about it. As is usually the case with interesting texts, I want to go off in a number of tangents at once which seems just a bit ironic to me in this case because at the heart of Cache is the static long shot. A scene is presented with no obvious context. The audience is forced to devise its own frame. And to make matters more frustrating for those viewers accustomed to Hollywood's narrative style, the long shot, which we associate with documentaries and truth turns out to be unreliable. The opening shot for example reveals the front of an apartment building. Suddenly, the image blurs and we realize that we're watching a videotape.

What struck me the most about the film was its depiction of mauvaise conscience. The protagonist, a host of an Apostrophes-like TV show, lives a comfortable life with his editor wife, a teenage son in a book-lined house (Even the flat screen TV is surrounded by books. The play between image and word would be very fun to explore in this.) The happily literate family is terrorized by a video stalker (God forbid that the image win over words I think) who sends them videotaped scenes from their lives along with childish pictures and makes the occasional silent phone call. (It might also be interested to explore the political ramification of muteness in that it is the victimized Algerian who is connected with the images depicting his victimization and vicitimizers).

While watching the family squirm, I thought of The Tell Tale Heart and Crime and Punishment. Although the "crime" committed by the protagonist as a 6-year old is forgivable, it is his unwillingness to confront the truth of his past which is most troubling. The stalker sends unflinching depictions (those static long shots which people so uncomfortable) of both past and present and the family has to look away and finally even to sleep in order to protect their comfortable lives. As much as the protagonist would like to delete the troubling scenes from his past (and as much as I suspect France would like to), he can't. And their supression just causes the guilt to fester.

I've only read one review of the film, but I'm very interested in doing so. How did it fare in American movie theaters as opposed to European movie theaters? (I noted the director won an award for his work at Cannes.) A phrase kept running through my mind while watching it: "Epatez les Bourgeois"