MAIN REVIEW:
This movie starts off as a four star psychological thriller with the camera focused on a townhouse in a quiet residential area in a large city in France. Nothing much happens, even after the opening credits have long since ceased scrolling. People walk by and a lone cyclist passes by. Only occasionally does a car drive past so we know that this area is very private even if it is in a major metropolis. Then we see a woman leave the townhouse with her husband following shortly thereafter. He walks up the side street right past where the camera is shooting without notice or recognition.

Voices speak quietly in the background and then we are surprised to see horizontal squiggles in the picture. Suddenly we are forced to recognize that this is not part of the movie but rather a movie within the movie as someone is now rewinding the tape that we had been watching. We in the theater audience had been fooled into thinking that the tape itself was the movie.

They are talking softly as the tape rewinds. We don't see them at first. "Where did you find it?" the man asks and the woman responds that she found it in a plastic bag lying on the floor of the small fenced porch outside their front door. No clues as to its origin are to be found, but both feel very uncomfortable at having physical evidence that they have been under surveillance. Who could possibly want to do this, and for what reason? The man nervously fumbles with the locks on their front door and then goes out to see if any other material may also have been left on their doorstep. There is nothing.

There is not one of us who can't identify with the terror of having our personal space, especially the privacy of our home, invaded by a person or persons unknown, possibly for a malicious purpose which has yet to be ascertained.

Some Americans not used to French cinematic subtleties might not enjoy the opening scenes of this movie. However, I found them to be masterful and suspenseful. An impending sense of dread about something unknown and in the process of development kept me on the edge of my seat. To say that this movie grabbed me and held my attention from this very first scene is an understatement.

The couple in this movie live a life of upper middle class comfort. The husband, Georges (Daniel Auteuil), is the host of a nationally televised talk show about books during which an interview with an author is followed by an animated discussion about the book with other invited guests. Most of the walls of their townhouse are lined with books which further evidences the fact that both Georges and his wife are fervent bibliophiles.

His wife, Anne (Juliette Binoche), is also in the book business as she is the assistant editor at a publishing house. Pierre (Daniel Duval) is Anne's immediate superior at the publishing house and both he and his wife, Mathilde (Nathalie Richard), are close friends with Georges and Anne.

Georges and Anne have one son, Pierrot (Lester Makedonsky). He is a quiet teenager who is going through a surly phase and makes every effort to be away from his home with his grade school friends. Pierrot is on the school swim team and is one of the better swimmers at competitive events.

A few days later George and Anne are having a casual dinner with Pierre and Mathilde in their dining room, a smallish room more like an alcove. Like many of the other rooms on the main floor, it is lined with books which cover the walls from floor to ceiling. Two additional friends, Yvon (Denis Podalydés) and Chantal (Aïssa Maïga), have been included in this convivial group and it is clear that they are all long time friends who share the same interests in intellectual and scholarly pursuits.

Well into the evening the doorbell very unexpectedly rings and everyone looks at each other. "Are you expecting anyone at this hour?"

Georges answers "No," and gets up to answer the door. He open it to find that there is no one there, but then he sees another plastic bag lying on the door step. His anxiety skyrockets and he walks out into the street, shouting out "Come back, you Coward!" All is quiet and there is no one that he can see in any direction as he looks up and down each darkened street away from the house.

Georges stands in the dark for a while and then he comes back into the house not quite knowing what to do with the bag, doubtless filled with another video cassette. He puts the bag into the pocket of his trench coat and then returns upstairs to the dinner party.

"Who was there?" "No one," but Georges and Anne exchange anguished glances. The mood of the dinner party has been interrupted and the four guests soon leave. Georges and Anne pull out the cassette and rush over to the television. It is another video of their house, once again just of their house, but now there is something new enclosed along with the video.

Both Georges and Anne are shocked when they open up a folded sheet of white paper and find that it contains a childish drawing of a little boy's head all drawn in black except for bright, vividly red blood gushing out of his mouth. Their sense of foreboding and concern ratchet up to a new level.

The two agonize over this new package and the meaning of the drawing. It is obvious that neither Georges nor Anne has a clue as to what this all means. Georges goes to the police, but they turn down his request for help until someone does something. They are powerless to do anything about packages which may or may not be perceived as veiled threats.

Then Pierrot comes home and asks his dad why he had sent a postcard to him at school. It contains another drawing of a little boy with bright red blood gushing out of his mouth. Now they realize that whoever this person may be also knows where their son goes to school. The screw keep turning and the tension keeps mounting.

A third plastic bag turns up, but this time the video is different. It is not of their house but of the farm in the French countryside where Georges had been raised as a child. His elderly mother still resides there with only a nurse to watch over her. Then Georges' secretary at his office hesitatingly gives him another letter that had been sent to his work address. It contains another graphic drawing, this time of a headless chicken with blood spewing from its neck.

The subject of this cassette and the grotesque drawing of the headless chicken remind Georges of an incident that had happened some 40 years before when he was a child. For the first time Georges has an inkling, an unspoken fear, of what this may all be about and who the perpetrator of these veiled threats may be. The growing realization spreads like a black cloud throughout his being. He makes plans for a quick visit to his mother to see how she is doing.

The family begins to disintegrate under the pressure. Georges won't open up to Anne about his suspicions, so they bicker constantly. With complete justification, she accuses him of not trusting her. Anne becomes an emotional wreck from the pressure which drives her into the arms of Pierre for the comfort and the assurances that she is not able to get from her husband. Whether or not they are having an affair is not made clear.

Their son, Pierrot, becomes even more sullen than usual and it is clear that something serious is bothering him. He also won't open up because he is just like his dad. And then he disappears. One night he doesn't return home even though it is well past his curfew. Worse yet, he left the house where he told his parents that he would be hours before and no one there or anywhere else knows where he now is.

George and Anne collapse into panic and immediately call the police to help in the search for their son. Threatening letters are one thing, but a kidnapping is something else and the police, to their credit, put on a full court press to help in the search.
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Admit it: You're intrigued by this premise, right? Just like me. Up until now I am gripping the edge of my seat and biting my nails from the tension. I can hardly stand the suspense. And my frail words hardly do justice to the visual impact of seeing this playing out on a large screen. But I am also intellectually curious about where this story is going. After all, this IS (so far) a great story.

Just what is going on and what is the foundation for all of this? What could Georges possibly have done to deserve this? At the moment we have not yet had any clarification about the presumed incident that must have happened when he was a child, so we wonder why he and his family are the subjects of such a relentless, invasive terror like this.

In summary, we have made an emotional and intellectual investment in the outcome of this movie. "The game's afoot," as Sherlock Holmes once said, and we are happily along for the ride.

Going in with this assumption, then it has to be stated that at some point there will be a payoff where all will be explained and all or most of the loose ends will be tied up. This story at its core is a mystery about an incident that has somehow and for some unknown reason provoked a long delayed response.

We have to assume that Georges is not the cultured gentleman and the intellectual elite that he now appears to be and that he must have done something horrible in his past to deserve a retribution such as this. After all, what we have seen so far can only be the opening salvo in a relentless war of nerves until some bitter end.

Now I more or less don't care what Michael Haneke as the writer of the screenplay as well as being the director of this film does to reach the end of the story. This has been his story and he certainly has gotten my attention and interest so far.

This is in spite of the fact that Georges, the main character in the movie and the object of someone's deep antipathy, does certain strange and stupid things to put himself in harm's way, if I may use that phrase. These are things that no American with an ounce of common sense would ever do. After the receipt of that first cassette we would call a private investigator. The receipt of the second cassette would force us to call our lawyer. The receipt of the third cassette would send us to the police to do forensic tests on the tapes and drawings. And then we would leave all of them to sort it out so that we could stay out of it. But, of course, then there would be no story.

So we buy into Haneke's premise and swallow our American sense of logic just to see where this story is going to go. It's all about the destination, and any normal person, me included, has the right to make a few demands when it comes to the resolution of this or any other story. Or call them expectations, if you will. These expectations are very simple and can be defined by three simple words: "Who?" "How?" and "Why?"

The main expectation of any story is the "Why?" since without it no story would exist. This is the first cause that creates all the subsequent events. Whatever punishment is to be meted out, for we certainly expect some punishment to be meted out, then that punishment MUST be proportional to the crime that Haneke has so far lead us to assume that Georges has committed.

The most important element to my argument here is that there should not be a grave mismatch between the crime and the punishment or we in the audience will have every right to feel cheated or offended or both.

Unfortunately, in this instance the "crime" turns out to be not much of a crime at all since it is more a case of misplaced anger because the real cause of the "crime," if I can still refer to it as that, is no longer available for retribution. In my opinion, Georges turns out not to have committed anything out of the ordinary and, furthermore, he has done nothing all that unusual that any other child in his situation wouldn't have done under similar circumstances.

I begin to feel cheated since I wonder what retribution could possibly be considered to be just for a crime that in my eyes doesn't even exist? The foundation of this story begins to crumble before my eyes.

Worse yet, the crime itself ends up being more of a liberal-left guilt trip rant in an effort to politicize the fact that some of us are born with more advantages than the rest of us. It appears that Haneke wants to beat up the person who has made something of himself and to hold it against him because he started off in comfortable circumstances.

By extension, he also wishes us to ignore the fact that Majid (Maurice Bénichou), George's antagonist, started off with little and has subsequently done worse in that he has made nothing of himself. In effect, he has buried his one talent in the ground while Georges had started off with ten talents and then made ten more. I ask you: Who was rewarded and who was punished in that parable?

The movie goes on to make a visual statement that is both shocking and unsettling with the result that the (supposed) sins of one parent are visited upon their children and so on.

Now, since I can't accept the fact that there even was a crime, then how can I accept the culpability of Georges for this crime? At the very least this calls into grave question the necessity of Haneke to give us this shockingly ugly visual. It seems to me that it was provided only to reinforce his contention that a crime was committed and existed in the eyes of others even though he has failed to prove his case to me that any of this is justified.

The two other expectations (the "How's?" and the Why's?") are that there must be some effort made to tie together the various strands of the story in order to wrap up the mystery into some sort of a cohesive package that ends up being both intellectually AND morally satisfying.

The movie just can't, or shouldn't, leave all of us sitting in the theater with big question marks in little white cartoon balloons over our heads. A woman in the audience where I saw this movie felt impelled to stand up in the theater at the end of the film to ask the rest of us, all total strangers, "Will someone please explain to me what this was all about?" In all fairness, I couldn't answer her question.

Someone else then commented, "Did you see the last scene" where something happened (that I can't go into here because it is a "spoiler") and I was shocked because I was looking right at the screen and I totally missed it. It happened up in one corner of a screen filled with people and I missed it. How was I to notice which two people out of a crowd of people were the ones who made the difference? I was even looking for something to happen and I missed it.

Is this a challenge for the audience or a cinematic conceit where Haneke needlessly toys with us? You pick your answer as I have already picked mine. Unfortunately, the entire last half of this movie is like this.

In a side note, appearing in oddball morality movies like this seems to be standard operating procedure for French actors Daniel Auteuil and Juliette Binoche. They earlier starred together in the 2000 movie, "The Widow of St. Pierre," another film that started off well and then crashed into a very disagreeable wall of questionable morality and proportionality. I found that movie to be highly objectionable for those reasons and this movie uses similarly debased moral arguments as the foundation for its story.

Take a pass on this film in spite of the critics, including our town's finest, who have raved about this film.

A movie review by Carl Zapffe (02/12/06)