..Gary Dretzka
..Noah Forrest
..Leonard Klady
..R.J. Matson
..David Poland
..Douglas Pratt
..Ray Pride
..Michael Wilmington

Caché
Directed by Michael Haneke
Sony Classics

In a single masterful stroke, Michael Haneke explains everything in his new movie, Caché (****), or, "Hidden." And the solution is a matter of something being hidden in plain sight. If you are impatient, more than unobservant, you might miss it.

Cruelty and suddenness mark his compelling recent movies, like Code Unknown and Time of the Wolf, exacting essays that have moved beyond the audience-bludgeoning of his earlier sado-media-scorn-porn, near-intolerable films like Benny's Video and Funny Movies. Something's matured in this German-born, Austrian director's work. He's become less the distant, moralizing schematicist than an observant artist, attuned to the quiet river of denial of modern urban life and what the ruptures of its teeming yet placid surface can do to his characters. Stillness must eventually be followed by eruption. Things explode.

Georges (Daniel Auteuil) is a television presenter, an impatient man who does not like being challenged, a Final Cut pro who looks over his editor's shoulder as dry words or dead air is elided from his book-chat show. He sneers at showing weakness with the "politesse d'un con"-"an asshole's politeness." His wife, Anne (Juliette Binoche) works in publishing, frequenting book launch parties where pretentious guests yammer on about someone's work being "chez Baudrillard, chez Wittgenstein." Dinner parties are a large part of their social life. Their home is filled with pricy minimalist comforts, flat-screen TVs, and chockfull shelves that are like fortifications, the translucent dining-room table protected on three sides by tan- and white-spined paperbacks. The house looks ready for any French magazine that would have "Maison" or "Cuisine" in its name. The fortification of home is art-directed in the extreme and signifies wildly: what is up with those three black elephants on a mantelpiece? (The set for Georges' show, amusingly, is a satire of this room: three walls of fake books with blank spines around a glass table.) They're French and they talk about books: Civilized, non?

A videotape arrives in a plastic bag. We see its contents as the movie starts: The credits, small and uniform, pop across the screen in the first image, an innocuous establishing shot of a nice home on a Paris side street, shielded by fences, gates, greenery. After the credits obscure the image, they fade away, leaving us with the same shot. A woman's voice: "Alors?" (Then?) "Rien." (Nothing.) (This framing, repeated later by night, is uncommonly creepy.) Now it rewinds, bands of video noise across the frame: our placid gaze disrupted.

The stare, the extended stare, the incessant study of single images: what narrative does an apparently neutral yet taut frame offer the viewer? This is a canny study of the master shot as well, that is, the extended take, from a distance and frontal, unbroken and with no intermediate angles, which suggests the unpracticed eye plopping a camera onto a tripod or a coolly chosen perch for a surveillance camera. What can be revealed in such images?

More tapes arrive. They're increasingly personal. They fear for their young son's safety. Georges starts his own investigation of their "asshole stalker," which causes more damage than the strange, unsettling videos. Of course, the "terror" comes from within, the repression of how one's past leads to one's future. Post-9/11 and Iraq-incursion metaphors range free. And "I lied to save you more stress, has the world stopped spinning?" has an uncomfortable kinship to other blunt weapons of mass media that grow increasingly strident. Georges suspects the grown version of a boy, Majid, an orphaned Algerian who was almost adopted by his mother when his parents disappeared. (Haneke illuminates a nasty slaughter by the Parisian police in the 1960s.) But he will not tell Anne the details, which are exactingly parceled out by Haneke. Fathers and sons share blood and lineage. Things explode.

Haneke does not waste a breath. I hated his early movies, but what he is now capable of is quietly spectacular. If it took those smug horrors to get Haneke here, then that is good, because Caché is a quiet, indelible thriller that no one else could have made.

Many reviewers have insisted on giving away two extremely impressive moments in the movie, especially Michael Wilmington of the Chicago Tribune and Stuart Klawans of The Nation for one, and in three paragraphs, Roger Ebert the other. One wonders: is this a case of attempting to seem smarter than the average viewer, or providing a genuine service, a skeleton key to Haneke's restrained style? In the Nation, Stuart Klawans, who does not like the film, and provides a useful backgrounder on Haneke's compulsions, avers that "the chic European cityscapes and calculating characters cannot redeem the film's shallowness and lack of originality… Far from being an expression of liberal guilt (the charge against which some commentators have defended the movie), Caché is an appeal to liberal self-regard…. And a fancy one at that. With Auteuil and Binoche as his stars, with the best Parisian living spaces as his settings, Haneke strips away only the most chic trappings of bourgeois respectability. The performances: superb. The cinematography: glistening. The directorial skills: worthy of golden palms."

- Ray Pride