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At the Movies: Hidden
Where would I be without French movies?
Probably sitting at home reading The Decline of the West, while
down at the local cinema you can actually see Spengler’s scenario being
enacted—and brilliantly enacted—before your very eyes.
Hidden is the work of a gifted film
director, Michael Haneke. The plot is deliberately shifty, with false
trails and loose ends that never get tidied up, but basically it’s a
variation of Rosebud and Citizen Kane. Boy is deprived of parental
love. Boy never forgets. Boy seeks vengeance many years later—Spengler
getting into the story because of all the colonial connections, a revenge
theme involving Algeria, and the peculiar form of incendiary barbarism now
common in metropolitan France. Being a view from the Left, it also
features the usual mordant portrayal of French middle-class life as cold,
alienating, and pointless.
But it’s very well done. As a youngster,
Georges (Daniel Auteuil) was the villain who long ago did the wicked
childhood deed, cruelly expelling an Algerian boy from his adopted home
into an orphanage. Maybe that’s enough to severely twist one’s mind:
anyway director Michael Haneke seems to think so, and thirty years later
it’s payback time for the Algerian, a poor and rumpled banlieu
inhabitant named Majid. He has videotapes of Georges’ house delivered
anonymously to Georges, to his wife (Juliette Binoche), to his son at
school, tapes accompanied by ugly drawings of a face vomiting blood, the
whole thing menacing and ambiguous in the extreme. And before long the
lives of TV chat-show host Georges, his cool wife (Juliette Binoche), and
his son, begin to unravel.
But maybe Majid didn’t make the anonymous
tapes or draw their gory accompanying pictures. Maybe his son did. Maybe
nobody did—it’s that sort of plot, and though the nervous inquiry into
what is actually going on keeps you on the edge of your seat, some would
say it’s too clever by half. When Georges tracks down Majid to a squalid
and untidy flat, and accuses him of attempted extortion, Majid cuts his
own throat in Georges’ presence—it makes a bloody mess all over the
wall—an act incomprehensible as anything other than desperate, suicidal,
spite.
Though of course the intended political
implications are all about France’s colonial sins. According to the story
told by director Haneke there was a demonstration of Algerians in Paris in
October 1961 when Majid’s parents died, allegedly thrown into in the
Seine. The drowned mother and father had been immigrant farmhands on
Georges’ parents’ estate: that’s why the latter felt obliged to adopt
Majid. But the trail of guilt goes on and on and on. Much earlier there’d
been the occupation of Algeria by the French in the 19th
century. So step by historical step, invisible but implied, is a moral
tale of colonial oppression, of Algerian innocence, and of unmistakable
French culpability, leading all the way from General Clausel’s bombardment
of Algiers in 1830 to the riots in the banlieux today.
* * *
Film directors on the Left need to be closely
watched. It is of interest that Hidden presents as “history” the
deaths of 200 in a demonstration on October 17, 1961, most by drowning. I
understand there is no mention of this in Alistair Horne’s well-known book
about the Algerian war, A Savage War of Peace.
The French-language paper El Moudjahid,
published in Tunis at the time by the Algerian Provisional Government,
reports October demonstrations three times however, once on November 1st,
and twice on November 22nd. The November 1st report is in an
article “The October Days”. This describes 80,000 demonstrators being
attacked by police and gendarmes, unprovoked police firing at 20.45 hours,
and dead bodies on sidewalks. It makes no mention of drownings or the
number of casualties.
On November 22 the first report criticizes
“The Silence of the Left” and while it describes police violence, again
makes no reference to either drownings or the number of casualties. The
second November 22 report in El Moudjahid is by a participant in
the demonstration and has the title “Escaped from Drowning”. A 20-year-old
Algerian tells how he was arrested; how he saw a fellow-demonstrator
beaten up and thrown into a river; and how he escaped the same fate.
My highly reliable source for this
information informs me that “El Moudjahid, a
monthly, was full of reports both of Algerian demos and of French
repression. From Tunis they were in constant telephonic contact with
France. Had there been a mass drowning, or massacre on October 17, this
would have been given enormous prominence.” Instead what we find in its
pages is mention of one man thrown into a river, and someone else
escaping. In other words the “200 drowned demonstrators” would seem
to be a largely hearsay episode serving the propagandist purposes of
director Haneke.
* * *
The French characters in Hidden are
generally cold and unsympathetic, as civilized and literate members of the
bourgeoisie always must be in moral tales of this kind—Haneke’s
contribution to a genre of French historical appeasement that Oswald
Spengler would recognize easily enough (all of it part of Europe’s death
wish) though as an aesthete of severely demanding taste he might have
found the gratuitousness of the suicide uncalled for.
But that the French, for all their artistic
gifts, should now be governed by a directionless élite incapable of
dealing with the marching armies of exotic enragés they and their
ancestors blindly conjured into being; that their leaders should find
themselves taking refuge in the gilded Parisian redoubts of the Gallic
state… Well, the impending decline and fall of Jacques Chirac and
Dominique Marie François René Galouzeau de Villepin does seem fitting enough.
Schadenfreude however is not an
attractive sentiment. And I’d be sorry if Haneke (an Austrian by the way)
got his own throat cut one day. If Juliette Binoche got hers cut it would
be downright sad. We need them around making films—however politically
misconceived.
June 2006
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