Ah, the French!

Le Fils (The Son) comes highly recommended by critics all over, with its lead actor winning Best Actor at Cannes in 2002. The Dardenne brothers are former documentarians, and they carry their love for realism and observation into their fictional films. Everyone seems to love them, with reviews filled with phrases like "searing Christian allegory" and "masterful control" and things like that.

And while those may be (at least partially) true - I certainly saw glimpses of them - I can't help but wonder if it isn't some collective hallucination. Because I really dislike this film.

Why? Because it is the first movie since The Blair Witch Project to make me feel physically sick. And I think I felt worse after this one.

It's done almost entirely in handheld close-ups, and after a few minutes, all that panning and walking and tilting and shaking conspire to make you feel like you just got off all the rides in Six Flags combined. I got a throbbing headache which lasted the whole night, so any life-shattering lessons there were to be learnt in the film escaped me.

There should be something meaningful here, and I wouldn't say, "Don't see this movie!" But if you do, make sure that it's on video and not in a theatre. Unless you want to get violently ill.


On the other hand, Caché makes one sick as well, but in an entirely different, and altogether more pleasant way. Perhaps pleasant isn't the best word to use, since what you get is an increasingly unbearable feeling of tension and unease, culminating in an explosively traumatizing scene guaranteed to shock even the most experienced moviegoer. Like Tim, who wrote a much better review than this, the entire audience in my theatre gasped at this scene.

Michael Haneke's films do not usually get to play in Singapore. The last one I saw was La Pianiste (The Piano Teacher), almost four years ago. Scott Tobias of The Onion writes of the "frightening control he can wield over a collective audience’s emotions", and I can't think of another phrase to describe his skill as accurately. Yet he never resorts to cheap tricks like scary sound effects and MTV-style editing. In fact, Caché has no music soundtrack at all, and is probably stronger for it. He simply lets his camera sit there and observe, or cuts between standard, classic point-of-view shots and lets his actors and situations do the work. In fact, his style is should typically be described as "restrained", because he rarely goes for the "money shot", but rather leaves most things to your imagination.

Unlike most directors, his use of tension and unflinching violence is not to entertain the audience, but to punish them. I cannot claim ownership of this insight, because I read it from elsewhere, but that doesn't make it any less true. Nor does it diminish the emotional and psychological power of his films. If you're looking for a good time, it's best to avoid Haneke completely. If, however, you have a sado-masochistic bent and are willing to bend over and call him "Master", you'll find yourself amazed at his stuff.