ABSTRACT |
Michael Haneke’s latest film Caché/Hidden (2005) has received
general acclaim by critics (best director award at Cannes, nominated for
the Golden Palm, best European Film Award, etc.) while the audience’s
reaction has been unenthusiastic, not to say utterly adverse. The film’s
central motif, some videotapes taken from the protagonist’s house, seems
to have been borrowed from David Lynch’s Lost Highway (1997) to
further develop a story in which the mystery about the identity of the
video stalker mingles with an episode from the protagonist’s past with
some political overtones. This paper starts by analysing the initial
similarities between Lost Highway and Caché in order to
explore the latter’s ambivalence between the critics’ perceived openness
and the audience’s disappointment at the film’s failure to comply with
narrative and generic conventions.
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