Hidden

The understory dominates the overstory to a degree that makes Michael Haneke's film opaque and elusive. The question, "What is actually happening?" becomes less relevant than "Who is where and why?", although, even this, has a certain bourgeois inevitability. The director's insistence on long static shots slows everything down to the pace of CCTV - i.e. realism without the sexy bits.

Georges (Daniel Auteuil) is the presenter of a popular literary television talk show and his wife Anne (Juliette Binoche) is a publisher. Their teenage son Pierrot (Lester Makedonsky) survives in the spaces between by becoming a school swimming star.

It is obvious, however, that not all is as it appears, not that appearances are ever simple. Anne behaves as if she dislikes Georges. Certainly he irritates her and she is consistently stressed and crabby around him, resenting her wifely role. After a while, it becomes obvious in a subtly layered way that she is having an affair with one of their best friends and, when Pierrot suspects, he runs away for a night and never says anything.

Georges is insecure about his job, whether his bosses want to continue with the show, or not, and obsessed about a possible stalker who sends video tapes through the post, which show the front of their house, shot from a hidden camera, recording the movement of cars and pedestrians and himself, or Anne, leaving/entering, like one of Andy Warhol's Empire State Building yawnathons.

Paranoia starts affecting this erudite couple and Georges decides, based on no evidence whatsoever, that their video snooper is an Algerian who, as a boy, was adopted by Georges' parents, only to be discarded, or rather handed over to Social Services, after an unfortunate experience with a chicken.

The mystery and the bad marriage frustrate the telling of the story, because so much is repressed, unspoken, festering. After a shocking incident, which comes as a complete surprise, the film suddenly leaps into life, but it is already too late. The only one you care about by then is Pierrot and he's not talking.

The performances, as you would expect, are exquisite and the film is intellectually challenging.