TripAdvisor - Paris
home
| art & architecture | books & cds | dance
| destinations | film | opera | television | theater | archives
In Hidden, a French family is terrorized
by an unknown antagonist. Surveillance tapes of their luxurious town house are delivered
to them along with drawings of a child with blood flowing from its mouth. The doorbell
rings, but no one is there. The police are of no help and tension within the family grows.
Issues of trust arise between Georges (Daniel Auteuil), moderator of a literary television
program, and his wife Anne (Juliette Binoche). There is concern for their only son who is
immersed in adolescent moodiness.
Georges pays a visit to his mother (Annie Girardot) who lives on the
family farm and pieces of the past start to surface. As a child, George had befriended
Majid, the son of an Algerian couple who worked on the farm. On Oct. 17, 1961 some 200
Algerian protesters died at the hands of the Paris police, including, for purposes of
Haneke's tale, Majid's parents. Georges and his family, who had considered adopting Majid,
betray him, sending him away.
As Georges continues to investigate clues as to the origin of the tapes
and threats, his path crosses that of Majid these many years later.
Director Michael Haneke (Time of the Wolf, The Piano Teacher) continues to deliver
complex, challenging cinema in Hidden. Not one to offer simple answers or, for
that matter, simple questions, Haneke explores his themes with a richness of thought and
the kind of ambiguity that prohibits easy resolutions and passive viewing. His films
demand active intellectual participation by the audience which is rewarded with insight
rare in current film.
French-Algerian relations and cultural conflict reflect world-wide
differences between First World and Third World peoples, between have and have-nots. A
certain smugness and sense of self-entitlement among the haves and the desperation of
poverty, fueled by religious fervor, among the have-nots has heightened conflict, often
taking the multiple forms of terrorism.
It will leave some viewers off guard that Haneke never definitively
exposes the perpetrator of the terror in Hidden (though numerous clues are
furnished). But Haneke, as he builds tension, as well as a claustrophobic sense of threat,
suggests that the particular source of a terrorist act is not the point. Terrorism has
become a world-wide phenomenon; a vast population of people who have nothing to lose will
produce willing participants to terror so long as the social and economic injustices of
the colonial and post-colonial eras continues.
Events of recent years have left the western world in fear of
continuing terrorist acts; no one feels as secure from violence as they did even a
decade ago. Haneke approaches the issue from the microcosm, from the experience of one
family and its own history of cultural insensitivity, but his message is universal.
Taking the traditional thriller genre and retaining its quality of gripping suspense,
Haneke subverts it into a trenchant commentary on the seemingly irresolvable malignant
conflicts of our time.
- Arthur Lazere
