Two of 2005’s best films were reveries on the nature of cinema. The most obvious one, A History of Violence, has been justly lauded for the way it deconstructs its own brutality, in the very same breath that it exhales astonishingly violent pyrotechnics. David Cronenberg’s icy, measured pacing and too too-perfect family idyll, which suffuses the film with an undercurrent of seeping dread, is interrupted by sequences of stupefying savagery, which cause a recoil from Mortensen’s feral reflexes, undoing years of films from master stylists—John Woo, Johnnie To, Roberto Rodriguez, etc.—who exalt violence as another expressive form to be choreographed. A History of Violence is brilliant because it returns violence to its primal seat, forcing us to simultaneously contemplate its ugliness (as visceral fact) and allure (as a tradition of visual representation). In the year’s other great meta-film, Caché, Michael Haneke’s reflexive interrogation is certainly less flashy than Cronenberg’s, but it’s no less elemental or profound. Haneke probes the depths of his medium, implicating the very material of film into a disquieting drama of guilt, repression, and the great social divide.

It begins with Caché’s opening shot, which is elegantly simple, but detonates an effect that sends shockwaves through to the end of the film. An establishing shot of an unremarkable 13th arrondissement abode serves as the background for opening credits, and then becomes a strident act of deconstruction as the image pauses and then fast-forwards, sending the Parisian cars and pedestrians populating the shot into chaotic motion. The image processing and acousmatic voices heard on the soundtrack, belonging to Georges (Daniel Auteuil) and his wife Anne (Juliette Binoche), reveal the variable image as a surveillance tape, left anonymously on their doorstep, no doubt intended to terrorize them. It’s a surpassing and brilliant stroke of economy, as Haneke dispenses with narrative exposition, aligns character antipathies, and establishes his dominant visual trope—all within a single shot. Which is why he transcends David Lynch in Lost Highway, who used a similar conceit—anonymous surveillance of the domestic sphere—as an entry point into his familiar concerns about shifting identities and the fallacy of the nuclear family, but without the complimentary statement of visual principles.

It is no small matter that Haneke chose to shoot on digital video, for it allows him to radically destabilize the act of viewing. By using DV, the tactile or imagistic quality of the many surveillance videos surfacing on Georges and Anne’s doorsteps is identical to the unmediated images viewed by moviegoers from the theater, sending the diegetic status of any given image into doubt. Any tracking shot is another potential surveillance tape, either confirmed by meddling with the medium (fast-forward, rewinding) or denied by a character’s presence (as when Georges walks into a shot tracking along the hallway of Majid’s apartment building). Like Rainer Werner Fassbinder, who assiduously avoided viewer identification by having his characters repeatedly walk into their own point-of-view shots, Haneke is assaying a similar kind of spectator re-education. Classical cinema’s visual pyramid—long shot/medium shot/close-up/reverse shot/close-up and back again—is essentially a rubric designed to delimit the murky boundary between an objective and a subjective camera. And Haneke has no truck with that system of representation. Dreams and visions come to the fore with an associative, unpredictable immediacy found in Hiroshima mon amour and Last Year at Marienbad, prompted, as often as not, by the grizzly childish drawings that are wrapped around the surveillance tapes. Because so many shots are indeterminate, and so few are foregrounded with markings of familiar film grammar, we’re forced to continually evaluate their evidentiary qualities and take nothing for granted. (Georges himself is even imbricated in the plasticity of the cinema, seen in one sequence to be editing the footage of his television show.)

Speaking of evidentiary qualities, though, is more than a little controversial in a work that has such an ambiguous flirtation with meaning and interpretation. After Claire Denis’ The Intruder, Caché is easily the year’s least understood film, not in the sense of being underappreciated, but in terms of the roadblocks thrown up in the way of lucid interpretation—though the two go about the project in vastly different ways. As Denis herself intimated to REVERSE SHOT writer Adam Nayman, The Intruder is a straightforward narrative obscured by formal machinations—elliptical editing, pile-ups of surgery-induced fever-dreams, etc.—while Caché, apropos of its title (Hidden), is a straightforward narrative that deliberately seeks to restrict information right from the off. The difference is that The Intruder’s meaning can be laid bare by a perceptive second viewing; a second time to the theater for Caché will clarify certain ambiguities, but ultimately, any discerning critic will reach the limits of his or her analytic abilities and still go wanting for a definitive and comprehensive meaning, because Haneke limits the clues he throws our way. As such, audiences are put in the same situation as Georges—furiously searching for the truth, but coming to grips with the dawning realization that an answer is probably not forthcoming. Who is surveilling the family—Majid or his son? Is Anne truly having an affair? As tantalizingly depicted in the astonishing final shot, what is the relationship between Georges’s and Majid’s sons? These questions are never satisfactorily answered. Haneke is so adept at setting his characters in motion against one another that it hardly matters; what matters is not so much who sent the tapes, but the timbre of interactions that the tapes set in motion. This is likely why so many people have griped about Caché being classified as a “thriller” or a “mystery” film. Fraught with generic baggage, those terms imply that the means and end of the film is to resolve a puzzle; Haneke’s rigorously constructed (and yet open-ended) film sees the tapes as a catalyst to study behaviors. Georges is forced to contend with the lingering miasma of his own socially motivated guilt, and makes account badly, adopting an embittered, defensive posture towards his wife.

Georges’s attitude is a potent synecdoche for the deplorable treatment of Algerians by the French, who assume an attitude identical to many other developed nations with a troubled ethnic past (which is to say all of them): an undercurrent of guilt that fades to barely discernible ambient noise unless called to account by monumental events. This is why I believe it’s folly to cite class and assault on the bourgeois-intelligentsia as Caché’s principal occupation. Race matters far more, and class matters only insofar as it is determined by race. Timeliness is neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition to canonize a film, yet it cannot escape notice that a scant few weeks before Caché’s theatrical debut, race riots erupted in Parisian suburbs. America is not the only major world power that has paid insufficient regard to its ethnic minorities. France has a deplorable history of relations with Algeria, whom it colonized in 1830, and meddled with until 1962 when the country gained independence through a bloody protracted military conflict. In the interim, France all but abrogated its responsibility to its colonized nation, denying Algerian Muslims French citizenship and the right to vote—a right extended to virtually every other segment of the Algerian population. Many Algerians migrated to France and formed the drastically underpaid bottom of the working-class chain, a social disparity that still lingers and is dramatized in Caché. Majid’s parents worked for Georges’s at his ancestral home, and when they died, Georges’s folks took in Majid. Subsequently, the young Georges precipitated the young Majid’s ouster from the household by deceiving him into killing one of the family’s roosters. The images incited in Georges’s day- and nighttime reveries are not enough to exonerate his culpability in Majid’s social station; but on the other hand, they are hardly enough cause to motivate Majid’s violent actions. Haneke is not the only director to illuminate the great class divide in France, nor is he alone in contending with France’s Algerian legacy (Jean Rouch and Godard were more than preoccupied) nor is he the first to structure that difference along geographical-ethnic lines (for one, Adellatif Kechiche’s banlieue tale L’Esquive, in which the white upper class is a structuring absence, barely pipped Haneke at the post), but I’d wager that Haneke is unique in that he accompanies the social discourse with as thorough an interrogation of his own medium.

Dizzying formal mastery aside, the primary reason Caché is so praised stems from its inscrutability. Virtually every film that comes around is predicated on a promised resolution, to the point where directors don’t expect their audiences to do any work. At their most fundamental level, the machinations and mystery of film noir are but placeholders counting time until the grand reveal, when the filmmaker points our attention to the signs we glossed over in the gloom. There is pleasure involved in having the curtain pulled back for us, pleasure to be had reveling in dramatic manipulation—but laziness too. Knowing that resolution is forthcoming, we don’t have to work very hard in constructing meaning. In a sense Caché is a noir that halts tantalizingly short of the great payoff, opting for a polyphony of unstable interpretation (the final shot warrants myriad readings, all equally valid) instead of a stable single one. Haneke presents clues and stubbornly—deliciously—denies catharsis, making us scrape and battle for every hard-won revelation (if there are indeed any revelations at all). Haneke seeks to retrain our eyes; he also desires to reprogram our expectations.