Dir. Michael Haneke, Fr/Aus/Ger/It, 2005, 117 mins, subtitles
Cast: Juliette Binoche, Daniel Auteuil, Maurice Benichou, Annie Giradot, Lester Makedonsky, Bernard Le Coq
Hidden begins unceremoniously with an image of a Paris street scene, a static camera holding a long-shot that allows people and everyday life to move in and out of the frame. There goes a car, and another; there is a woman coming out of her house; he comes another car, and so on. As the opening credits roll across this image, the voiceover dialogue first goes unnoticed as the audience is disoriented and trying to establish the setu-up, and it takes a moment or two to register what the voices are saying. However, almost at a clearly-defined split second, we become aware that what we are seeing on the screen is not the film’s own opening scenes as such (although, of course, we are), but the contents of a mystery video sent to a husband and wife. Immediately, as we assimilate the situation, we are transported from being casual viewer to an unexciting street scene, to being fully immersed in the action, posited alongside the couple, sharing their limited knowledge. We are no longer impartial but complicit.
The couple in question are Anne (Binoche) and Georges (Auteuil) Laurent. He is a television presenter on a book programme, and together they have a sulky adolescent son, Pierrot (Makedonsky). However, theirs is very much the picture of professional-class existence society expects from a financially comfortable and intellectual family. However, their peace is slowly fragmented by the continual arrival of a succession of videotapes. Each time they display outwardly non-threatening images of Anne and George going about their lives, but inwardly they and we know that someone, somewhere, is hidden, watching, and human beings – like any animal - do not like being unable to defend themselves in such a situation.
Before long, they receive a tape that shows the farmhouse in which Georges grew up. As obsession grips him, he continually plays the tape until a freeze-frame announces the name of a road. Georges undertakes some detective work and re-traces the route taken within the video, effectively putting himself into the hands of the videomaker, as if following a path which was pre-ordained for him, his destiny, and relinquishing his own free will in his quest for the occult. He finds himself in an apartment building with a man he recognises from his past. Here, long-hidden secrets and suppressed emotions are forced into the open, and Georges has to confront some truths about himself. Sadly, this does not come easy, and his tendency to ignore or deny that which he would prefer not to see, will have unprecedented repercussions for all concerned but particularly for him.
Hidden is a masterful film in that it reveals so little and yet we learn so much. Binoche and Auteuil are two of France’s leading actors. Despite once famously proclaiming: “I didn’t think the British liked me”, Binoche is an immensely sympathetic character here, playing a woman who is afraid and exasperated that her partner serves only to add to that fear by way of his own restricted emotions. Auteuil, similarly, portrays a scared and guilty man who has learned to believe the lies of his TV persona, that he’s a successful guy, a learned man whom everybody loves. His apprehension is slow, which makes his eventual realisation of the consequences of his past actions all the more painful to behold.
Hidden is also masterful because the film’s original plot is never fully resolved, and we don’t care that it’s not. Who exactly delivers these videotapes and why? Whilst the film remains ambiguous, the viewer is no longer concerned with this issue as they are now too fully immersed in the consequences of the tapes arrival. Like us, Georges’ original intention was to find the sender of the tapes and to ask why, but what he finds instead is so much more intriguing and potentially more threatening, placing us in the tantalising position of wanting to know the answers which Georges keeps hidden, both from us and himself.
Haneke’s slow ponderous style is perfectly suited to the subject matter within Hidden. It does not overtly confront the audience but instead coerces them in, before hitting them right between the eyes with moments that would truly shock within any film, let alone the slow meander of Haneke’s hitherto emotionally-restrained feature.
The film was one of the big winners at Cannes and the European Film Festival in 2005, and deservedly so. It is a multi-layered subtle mystery that need not be a mystery, if only it’s main protagonist acted differently, then and now, but humans never do, and this is what this film is about, an examination of the slowly evolving consequences of such.
Jean Lynch
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