[ThisWeek] Frontline's "Is Wal-Mart Good for America?" and Cache at the Kenworthy Performing Arts Centre

[thisweek at kenworthy.org]

This week at the Kenworthy Performing Arts Centre...

NoSuperWalMart presents
Frontline's "Is Wal-Mart Good for America?"

Thursday, April 20
7:00 PM
Free

A discussion moderated by Kenton Bird, Director of UI¹s School of Journalism
and Mass Media, will immediately follow the showing.
* * *
Caché (R)

Friday, April 21
7:00 PM
Saturday & Sunday, April 22 & 23
4:10 & 7:00 PM
$5/adults
(see Review below)
* * *

Next week at the Kenworthy-

Why We Fight (PG-13)

Friday, April 28
7:00 PM
Saturday & Sunday, April 29 & 30
4:30 & 7:00 PM

Coming in May: Brokeback Mountain, Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story,
Match Point, Rendezvous Showcase

Regular movie prices:  $5/adult, $2/child 12 or younger
KFS series pass prices:  $30/10 films, $75/30 films. KFS pass good only for
Sunday movies.

For more information on movies, events, rental rates, and/or to download a
schedule, visit our website at www.kenworthy.org
* * *

Caché (Hidden)

Written and directed by Michael Haneke
In French, with English subtitles

Rated R (Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian). Its
single short scene of violence is among the most upsetting in a movie this
year.
Running time: 2 hours

As reviewed by A. O. Scott writing for the New York Times

Michael Haneke's "Caché (Hidden)" begins, as many films do, with an exterior
establishing shot. We are looking down a narrow Paris street at a
nondescript house, fairly certain that cinematic convention will soon invite
us inside. But there is something odd about this ordinary, even banal,
image. The camera, perfectly still, lingers for an unusually long time, and
we begin to suspect we may not be alone. Someone is watching with us, and
perhaps even watching us as we watch. It turns out that this is not only the
opening shot in a movie, but also part of a surveillance video.

Thus, before we even know what is happening, Mr. Haneke, one of the most
exquisitely sadistic European filmmakers working today, has deposited his
audience at the Hitchcockian junction where voyeurism intersects with
paranoia. We are at once innocent and complicit, as if the idle curiosity
that brings us into the theater authorized a malignant form of spying. The
residents of the house, Georges and Anne Laurent, who have received the
video in a bag left on their doorstep, certainly feel violated and intruded
upon. Why would anyone do such a thing? What have they - Georges and Anne, a
perfectly respectable upper-middle-class professional couple - done to
deserve this?

The question turns out not to be rhetorical. The tape is followed by others,
and by violent drawings made all the more disconcerting by their
childishness. Variations on that enigmatic, implacable opening shot pop up
again and again, intensifying the ambience of suspicion and multiplying the
film's ironies and implications. Georges (Daniel Auteuil) is the host of a
highly rated literary talk show on public television (this is France,
remember), and is therefore used to the camera's scrutiny. Anne (Juliette
Binoche), who works in publishing, finds her husband's response to their
invisible stalker annoyingly secretive and mistrustful. Their relationship
starts to crack and buckle, even as they try to maintain an illusion of
blithe bourgeois normalcy for their friends and their 12-year-old son,
Pierrot (Lester Makedonsky).

"Caché" can be interpreted both as a response to the Sept. 11 attacks and,
in retrospect, as a prophecy of the riots that convulsed France's
impoverished suburbs this fall. What is hidden, above all, from the Laurents
and their ilk are the social grievances directed against them. The drawings
and videotapes are a form of psychological terrorism, the roots of which lie
in Georges's provincial childhood and in the events of Oct. 17, 1961, when
as many as 200 Algerian protesters died at the hands of the Paris police,
then commanded by the former Nazi collaborator Maurice Papon.

At times "Caché" resonates, none too subtly, with the oft-repeated post-9/11
question: Why do they hate us? Because we don't hate ourselves sufficiently,
Mr. Haneke responds, doing his bit to make up the shortfall. But while this
film can seem politically simplistic, it is nonetheless psychologically
astute, and more complicated than it at first appears. Mr. Auteuil and Ms.
Binoche are too sensitive and agile to be ideological marionettes, and in
spite of his finger-pointing it is not really Mr. Haneke's intention to
reduce Anne and Georges to stereotypes. While the obvious movement of the
film is centrifugal, drawing back from the cocoon of the Laurent household
into a world of political violence and social misery, it also pulls in the
opposite direction, propelled inward by the mysterious gravity of individual
motives and feelings. The initial shot of the movie is answered by the last,
which demands close attention and contains the intriguing suggestion that
the real story has been hidden all along - that it has been driven not by
the noisy public conflict between Arabs and Frenchmen, but rather by the
quiet, perpetual war between fathers and sons.


As reviewed by Peter Bradshaw writing for The Guardian (London)

A stiletto-stab of fear is what Michael Haneke's icily brilliant new film
delivers - not scary-movie pseudo-fear, but real fear: intimately horrible,
scalp-prickling fear. It is a stalker-nightmare with a shiver of the uncanny
and a double-meaning in the title: hidden cameras and hidden guilt. A famous
Parisian TV presenter receives menacing, mysterious "surveillance videos" at
his home, showing scenes from his private life. How on earth has the stalker
filmed these? There is no dramatic musical score, none of the traditional
shocks or excitements, just an IV-drip-drip-drip of disquiet leading finally
to a convulsion of horror.

Hidden is partly a parable for France's repressed memory of la nuit noire,
the night of October 17 1961, when hundreds of Algerian demonstrators in
Paris were beaten and killed by the police. As such, it is a cousin to
events just 11 years later, dramatised by Steven Spielberg in Munich but
utterly without Spielberg's need to find resolution and common ground.
Hidden is incomparably darker and harder. It is about the prosperous west's
fear and hatred of the Muslim world and those angry pauperised masses once
under our colonial control, and over whose heads a new imperium is being
negotiated in the Middle East and beyond. Haneke is often described as the
"conscience" of European cinema: but he is more a Cassandra, announcing a
coming catastrophe and fervently imagining its provocation, acting out the
cataclysm's tinder-spark. Haneke's vision is as cold and unforgiving as the
surface of Pluto.

Hidden is Michael Haneke's masterpiece: a compelling politico-psychological
essay about the denial and guilt mixed into the foundations of western
prosperity, composed and filmed with remarkable technique. It is one of the
great films of this decade.


As reviewed by Roger Ebert writing for the Chicago Sun-Times

The opening shot of Michael Haneke's "Caché" shows the facade of a townhouse
on a side street in Paris. As the credits roll, ordinary events take place
on the street. Then we discover that this footage is a video, and that it is
being watched by Anne and Georges Laurent (Juliette Binoche and Daniel
Auteuil). It is their house. They have absolutely no idea who took the
video, or why it was sent to them.

So opens a perplexing and disturbing film of great effect, showing how
comfortable lives are disrupted by the simple fact that someone is watching.

Another video arrives, showing the farmhouse where Georges and his family
lived when he was a child. All the videos they receive will have the same
style: A camera at some distance, simply looking. Many of the shots in the
film itself are set up and filmed in the same way, so that "Caché" could be
watching itself just as the videos watch the Laurents. No comment is made in
the videos through camera position, movement, editing -- or perhaps there is
the same comment all the time: Someone wants them to know that they are
being watched.

Another video arrives, showing a journey down a suburban street and into a
building. Georges is able to freeze a frame and make out a street name;
going off alone, he follows the path of the video and find himself in front
of a door in an apartment building. The person inside is someone he knows,
but this person (who I will not describe) is unlikely to be the author of
the alarming videos.

Georges conceals the results of his trip from his wife. Then another video
arrives, showing him speaking with the occupant of the apartment. Now there
is a fierce argument between Georges and Anne: She cannot trust him, she
feels. He must tell her who the person is. He will not. In a way, he cannot.
She feels threatened by the videos, and now threatened because her husband
may be withholding information she needs to know. Juliette Binoche trembles
with fury as the wife who feels betrayed by her husband; Daniel Auteuil, a
master of detachment, folds into himself as a man who simply cannot talk
about his deepest feelings.

Meanwhile their lives continue. Georges does the TV show. Their son goes to
school. There is a dinner party, at which a story about a dog will give you
something to recycle with great effect at your own next dinner party.
Georges goes to visit his mother. He asks about events that happened in
1961, when he was a boy. His mother asks him if something is wrong. He
denies it. She simply regards him. She knows her son, and she knows
something is wrong.

When "Caché" played at Cannes 2005 (where it won the prize for best
direction), it had an English title, "Hidden." That may be a better title
than "Caché," which can also be an English word, but more obscure. In the
film, the camera is hidden. So are events in Georges' life. Some of what he
knows is hidden from his wife. The son keeps secrets from his parents, and
so on. The film seems to argue that life would have gone on well enough for
the Laurents had it not been for the unsettling knowledge that they had
become visible, that someone knew something about them, that someone was
watching.

Film reviews are researched and edited by Peter Haggart
* * *

Kenworthy Performing Arts Centre
508 S. Main Street, Moscow, Idaho
208-882-4127
Sign up for this weekly email on events and movies at the Kenworthy by
logging onto our website
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~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
PAMELA PALMER, Volunteer
Mailto:ppalmer at moscow.com
Film and Events Committee
Kenworthy Performing Arts Centre

http://www.kenworthy.org
To speak with a KPAC staff member,
call (208) 882-4127
Mailto:kpac at moscow.com
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

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