fans of haneke are intelligent people

I am on your mothers dick although it isn't a dick, it's a vagina and it is purple and rancid. I think you infected it on your way out.

Well, it's been a while since I watched it, and it's not easy for me to explain in English, which is not my first language... but I'll give it a try.

(By the way, in my previous post, I wrote 'concealing to', which should have been 'concealing from', I guess.)

(SPOILER ALERT!!!)

Without going too much into detail, because then I'm gonna be typing for hours, basically, Haneke pulls off a kind of 'meta-trick', somehow similar to certain things he does in Funny Games and Das Weisse Band.

In the film, there is a classic, thriller-like 'mystery': who is sending the protagonist video tapes with images from his house? And why? (Similar to Lost Highway, in fact.) We find out gradually that there is some unresolved business from the protagonist's past, which might be haunting him. In the end, there turns out to be no logical solution to the basic mystery. The only person who could have filmed and sent the tapes is, well, Haneke himself, somehow breaking through the narrative, and intervening in the fictional world of the protagonist.

Now, because of the way the protagonist reacts to being 'watched', and deals with his past, he becomes a symbol for Western bourgeois arrogance. But in a way, I always felt that, as a person, he didn't really get a fair chance to react differently, because of the absurdness of the situation he is in: having to deal with things that happen in his reality, which are being controlled and manipulated by someone from another reality.

Also, the character being somehow trapped in an experiment led by the director (which, I admit, in a way all characters from all movies are), prevents him from becoming a 'real', nuanced character. I'm having a hard time sympathising with the plight of a character which has 'symbol' written all over it, in a narrative that has 'construct' written all over it. It's all just a bit too contrived.

Most importantly, I don't think Caché gains a lot in content or depth, through this very artificial construct. I think the themes in the film could have been perfectly adressed if the film would have been a more conventional thriller, without the meta-stuff. I guess I feel that, if you decide to do something as (relatively) radical as what Haneke does here, you better have a really good reason for doing so, content-wise.

Anyway, that was my reaction to it a couple of years ago, when I watched it for the second time. It might be different if I'd watch it again now.

On the other hand, I have seen Der Siebente Kontinent twice, and twice I was truly blown away by it, without any reservations. It's a radically dark and bleak film, a ruthless film, but very powerful, and much sharper in its dissection of modern Western society. If you ask me. Also, it has the amazing 'toilet shot': http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e6PN-8MOZnw

And if I just want to see a good, paranoid thriller, I can always watch The Conversation, one of my all-time favourites, for the hundredth time.