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Michael Haneke won Best Director at the Cannes Film Festival this year for his tightly wound thriller, Hidden (2005). The film begins with a premise eerily familiar to anyone who has seen David Lynch’s Lost Highway (1997): a married couple receive a mysterious video recording of the exterior of their home. Like the couple in Lynch’s film, Georges (Daniel Auteuil) and Anne (Juliet Binoche) become increasingly disturbed as more tapes turn up. Why on earth would somebody film the outside of their house and then deliver the tape to them? Is it some kind of threat or just a foolish prank?  Hidden: turn on, tune in and freak out
Like Lynch, Haneke uses static long takes which help to develop an almost unbearable tension. Both films spoon-feed information to the audience and we attempt to make the pieces fit in the same way the characters do. A conscious link between the two films is forged by the characters’ last names: ‘Laurent’ also exists in Lost Highway. However, after Hidden’s couple go to the police for help, the two films fork off onto separate paths. Uncertainty and unease cause friction within the family environment, with George linking the matter back to a long-forgotten event from the past, and Anne beginning to despair at her husband's increasingly secretive behaviour.
As real-life rioting and burning force Paris into a state of emergency, Hidden is particularly timely in its depiction of France’s class divide. There is little middle-ground between the film’s confines of comfortable middle-class suburbs and depressing, cramped tower blocks. Meanwhile, the director uses coverage on a television set to comment on America’s invasion of Iraq. Haneke has been called the ‘moral conscience of modern Europe in film’, and in Hidden he calls on individuals - and society in general - to accept responsibility for their actions.
Lost Highway: sex, lies, and videotape
The film repeatedly blurs the line between 'real' film footage and the images captured by a voyeuristic cameraman, disorienting the viewer and forcing us to reassess what we think we've seen. In Thailand, the movie has its original French soundtrack, and is subtitled in both French and Thai. While always engrossing and unpredictable, Hidden’s pacing is not for everybody and I sensed a few restless souls in the film’s last half-hour. There are still a lot of questions after the credits roll, and you may feel manipulated or cheated by Hidden’s ending. But, remember the immortal words of David Lynch when you walk in to the cinema… and especially when you are walking out:
“Life doesn’t make sense, so why expect a movie to?”
Hidden opens in Thailand on December 1st, and can be found at Bangkok’s
House Cinema, RCA .
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