French Cinema: Cache (2005)

(contains spoilers)  Daniel Auteuil certainly gets around.  It was a bit of a surprise that he was featured in this film as well as the last one I saw,  "Apres Vous".   In this one he is in a dramatic role as a TV personality, Georges Laurent, who has a talk show on TV.  However he is receiving a series of anonymous video tapes and childlike drawings which are disturbing.  The first one is simply a video tape of the entrance to his house.  The drawings are things like a child spitting blood, and a chicken spitting blood.  It is all very mysterious.  Who is doing this?  He doesn't know at first, but it instills a sense of dread for himself and his family, his wife and his son, a sullen teen who goes around in a moody and resentful silence.

Much of the power of this film has to do with the sense of mystery created by the videotapes, so perhaps it would be unfair to spoil it.  If you want to see the film, you should probably stop reading now.  

The videotapes turn out to be a campaign of guilt probably done by the son of a man who was once his adoptive brother (I say probably  because in this film it is never clear precisely who does what or exactly how.).   Georges' adoptive brother is an Algerian orphan created when there was a massacre of Algerians during the French-Algerian war.  His parents out of a sense of guilt decide to adopt the Algerian child, but this does not go over well with Georges, who resents the interloper. 

Georges, through some never fully revealed act of treachery, causes the Algerian boy to be expelled from the house and turned over to an orphanage and thus "ruining" his life, apparently.  All of this is gradually revealed by the end of the film.  I won't spoil all the surprises in the film, but I would like to note the ending, which shows from a distance the expulsion of the child from Georges' home and the Child and Family services workers take him away. 

It is filmed in a manner reminiscent of the last scene in Michelangelo Antonioni's film "The Passenger" where the dramatic final events of that film are shown from a distance in a mostly empty space in one very long take.