Film Club Featurette: Cache (2005)

On Wednesday, 2 February at 18:31 the Phnom Penh Film Club selection will be Michael Haneke’s tantalizing and intensely provocative psychological thriller from 2005, *Cache*, starring Daniel Auteuil and Juliette Binoche. 

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Since his breakthrough with 1997’s home-invasion arabesque *Funny Games*, Michael Haneke has continually distinguished himself as a director whose facility for nurturing audience discomfiture is surpassed only by his virtuoso flair for transgressive social comment. Every Haneke film presents us with the voyeuristic charge of seeing comfortable arrangements kicked specactularly over, and every Haneke film conceals within that story a deeply unnerving suggestion of our own tawdry contradictions and conceits. We are each the mark in a long-con spun from our own silly mythologies; we are each the victim of our self-inflicted torment and abuse. 

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Every Haneke film wraps these themes in different packaging, from the strained security of modern teacher-student power structures, to the distinctly bourgeois unease of having strangers outstay their welcome in our home. But with Cache, Haneke unquestionably attains the apotheosis of his chosen form—an essay on privilege, disempowerment and marital strife that manages to end up an indictment of post-colonial denial by the French upper middle class. And all of it hiding in the plain sight of a low-current, conspicuously unhurried suspense narrative about a journalist whose worst enemy finds ever-more-clever devices for heralding his resentment without revealing his identity, whereabouts or motive. 

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After the intensely stimulating Funny Games, after the quieter and much more subversive *Code Unknown* (2000), and particularly after the skin-crawling psycho-sexual pathos of *The Piano Teacher* (2001), Haneke’s credential as both a maestro of directorial suspense and a critically important voice of social contrarianism would never again come in doubt. With Cache, however, he has achieved something even more impressive: a film whose cinematic entertainment value feints us all into a suggestible vulnerability far more personal, and thus far more affecting when our own Faustian bargains and comfy hypocrisies are finally revealed as the whole point all-along. 

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I hope everyone can join us on Wednesday evening at 18:31 for this taut and meticulously enthralling tapestry of misdirection and deceit. I can’t always make this assertion, but in the present case I can solemnly attest that no one who comes to see this one for the first time will soon forget it.