"We want the viewer of our films not to be able to explain where
[characters] have come from and why they're behaving that way . . ."
- Luc Dardenne, in an interview with Geoff Andrew, February 2006

With La Promesse (1995), the Dardenne brothers' third feature film, the former documentarians launched a series of dramas set in areas based on their childhood home of Liege, an industrial Belgian town. The film focussed on Igor (Jeremie Renier), a boy who had promised a Burkina Faso illegal immigrant, soon killed at his father's building site, to look after his wife and child, even as his father covers up the death. Rosetta (1999), which garnered the brothers their first Palme d'Or, followed a teenaged girl (Emilie Dequenne) in her desperate quest to get and then hold onto a job at a waffle stand. Articles refer to the film in wild or warlike terms: a Sight and Sound interview piece is titled "Wage Warrior," while the following month's review notes that Rosetta seems to be "a latterday Everywoman seeking survival in post-industrial Belgium" (52), Rhys Graham notes that "Rosetta is, at all times, waging a campaign of war against the world" and Janice Morgan remarks that "We don't view Rosetta, we intercept her, like a moving target at close range" (527). Luc Dardenne comments in the February 2000 Sight and Sound interview, "'And we decided to follow Rosetta as you would follow a soldier in a war'" (24).

The effect of such battle-zone, on-the-spot camerawork is to make the viewer him- or herself feel pinned down, thrown into the midst of a underclass struggle; the Dardennes are showing us that "everyday life, principally for the poor but also for other classes, does violence to the body and to moral experience" (Kleinman 226) and the consequence of the Dardennes' filming style "is to implicate the viewer at all times" by never allowing "the luxury of distance" (Graham); as Nick James puts it, the Dardennes have so stripped down the "European tradition of realist image-making ... as to provide something antithetical to spectacle" (24)--that is, a cinematic witnessing. The Dardennes force us to look at people and their relationship to the world differently by demanding "a violent intimacy with its subject" (Morgan 528). Yet in accordance with mainstream television and Hollywood film, the central protagonists--with whom tele- and cineliterate audiences are conditioned to sympathize or empathize--are still essentially likeable: Igor, a basically innocent young boy who hesitates to go against his selfish, callous father, and Rosetta, a teenaged girl desperate to get herself out of the trailer park where she lives with her alcoholic mother.

With Le Fils (The Son) (1999), however, the Dardenne brothers launched a subtle attack on their audience's will to sympathize. The film begins with the camera situated a few feet from behind and slightly to the side of Olivier's (Olivier Gourmet) head. We spend much of the film looking at Olivier from such angles, usually from behind and slightly to the side, yet the camera is rarely stationary. The effect is to put us, literally, in the shoes of the cameraman, not in the shoes of Olivier, the main character. We are constantly shadowing him, catching up to him, coming down the stairs after him, seeing him through panes or half-blocked by walls; we may even feel privileged to be there, a closeness disallowed by most films, with their medium and long shots. We are so visually and, it seems, physically near to him that the situation demands sympathy, an emotional extension of support. (6) Yet the situation forecloses the possibility.

For the first half-hour of Le Fils, in fact (particularly if we don't know anything of the plot beforehand), it is unclear what is going on and what we can even commiserate with Olivier about. We start to visually "know" Olivier, at least through his gestures--someone often agitated, someone concerned with cleanliness in the carpentry workshop, someone who stumps his cigarette on his boot, then puts it in the front pocket of his overalls--but we don't actually understand what he is so concerned about as we watch him watching, looking through a window at an adjoining workshop at someone else. Magali, who seems to be his ex-wife, drops by his spartan apartment and tells him she's remarrying and she's pregnant. Olivier congratulates her, but remains quiet and withdrawn. Only we seem to have any access to him, however visually limited. Olivier seems increasingly concerned about a boy in the welding workshop, surreptitiously looking at him--their relationship is emphasized not by a conventional eye-match shot but by a sequence where we see the back of Olivier's head, then the camera whisks over to show the back of the boy, who is walking away, then whisks back to show Olivier looking after him--but it is not until twenty-two minutes into the film that he speaks to him, telling him to come to his workshop after he has agreed with the local organizer to take this new boy, Francis, on as a student.

Half-an-hour into Le Fils, when Olivier tells Magali that Francis Thirion has got out of prison but then tells her that he is not tutoring him, we start to realize what is happening, yet still there is an unbearable sense of tension, of a wave waiting to break (in fact, this tension remained for me when I saw the film a second time--the situation still felt palpably drawn out as I waited for Olivier to tell his wife that he is teaching Francis), and the air of foreboding is not broken, but only thickened, when we learn that Francis was in jail for killing Olivier's and Catherine's son. Olivier is still stalking Francis after class, even sneaking into his apartment and lying on his bed, and he still is hiding the truth from Catherine, but the sense of tension comes from not knowing what he will do--kill Francis?--because we cannot understand why he is doing what he is doing. In this way, the Dardennes offer a suspense film that gains its mystery from being unsolvable by the usual fail-safe method of sympathy; the viewer cannot know what exactly will happen because he cannot "know" or feel him/herself in the shoes of Olivier.

[Ilustration omitted.]

"Who do you think you are?" Magali asks Olivier after spying on him and seeing him give Francis a ride home. Her look is of utter incomprehension, and Olivier offers no response. Her question is ours. Why has Olivier taken this boy under his wing? To understand why he strangled his son? To reach for forgiveness? To wreak revenge? To perversely replace his dead son with his killer in a strange act of expiation? The viewer is forced into contemplation by the emotional distancing of the camera--we are always off watching from off to the side, a little bit behind the action, a kind of privileged passerby. By the end, when Olivier takes Francis to his brother's lumberyard, the tension is overwhelming, increased by Francis' wish for Olivier to be his legal guardian. Amongst the wood they will cut and shape, as Francis defers to his mentor, Olivier tells him, "The boy you killed was my son." Francis runs, Olivier chases after him, they run out into a knot of trees, Olivier chokes the boy with his hands, then takes his hands off him, they both breathe hard, and Olivier gets up. Slowly, Olivier returns to the car, where he begins to stack the lumber and tie it up. Francis eventually comes to help him and the screen goes black, cutting to credits. The film ends by eluding any clearer understanding through words, leaving us only with gestures and actions to be observed and an atmosphere of tension to be experienced indirectly, through the lens of the camera. (7)

We may wish to grasp for meaning through metaphor and symbolism. After all, Olivier is a carpenter whose disciples are young reforming criminals, and the movie is called The Son--surely the Christ-like parallels are obvious. Once again, though, the film punctures such convenient assumptions simply by immersing us in the details of the trade, as when Francis tests Olivier's ability to eye a distance to the nearest centimetre or Olivier has Francis note the types of wood they are examining in a lumberyard. The metaphor seems too easy and the world too authentic to make the film a simple, limited revision of a Messianic narrative. Most of all, Olivier's motives seem too unclear to make any Christian allegory stick. And who is the martyr--Olivier, Francis, or both of them? The overlapping impossibilities of the characters' own inabilities to sympathize with each other only complicate our task: Olivier lies in Francis' bed but still probes him for answers about the crime ("Why did you kill?"), to scant satisfaction; Magali and Olivier are utterly adrift from each other; Francis himself seems unable to understand the magnitude of his crime, referring to it distantly ("There was a death"). The Catholic notion of confession, which could lead to some kind of absolution, is thwarted.

[Ilustration omitted.]

The camera consistently emphasizes our inability to reach Olivier, to try to understand what he is doing and why. Even in an angled close shot of Olivier's eyes, the windows to the man's soul are distorted by the thickness of his glasses. Thus the Dardennes break with the convention of gazing at the protagonist as he gazes back, that mirror-like cinematic moment of "recognition/misrecognition" that Mulvey details (18). Such a conventional shot of Hollywood cinema is crucial to the manufacture of empathy in Western film, for, as Mulvey explains, "the cinema has structures of fascination strong enough to allow temporary loss of ego while simultaneously enforcing it" (18). A "typical" bourgeois adult viewer, I argue, in gradual reaction to the childhood experience of perceiving a mirror image of the self as superior (17), has come to regard the protagonist, so often shot in lingering close-up, as thankfully separate from him or her but worthy of interest (if only because said viewer is paying money to watch the image), and so sympathy is shaded with pity.

In Le Fils, the Dardenne brothers' avoidance of conventional, sympathy-manufacturing camera angles, in crucial combination with a mystifying situation, utterly confounds our desire to connect, however "truthfully," with Olivier. We want to understand but cannot. Even as Olivier struggles to accept the freedom of his son's killer, we must accept our remove, our subjectivity, our inability to sympathize, an inability that flies in the face of sym/empathy- or aspiration-based television and cinema. This is the great success of the Dardennes' work--if a viewer does not leave the theatre or stop watching the tape or DVD of the film, they reach a point beyond sympathy, a political state where they can now, if willing, rethink their power relationship to the characters in the film and the situation they are in. What are our notions of forgiveness? How can we make a general judgement about child killers when faced with this particular, extraordinarily complex and realistic account of one victim's father's own effort to reconcile himself to it? The political collides with the personal: Olivier's grief is intensely personal, but the aftereffects of his grief, as shown by the Dardenne brothers in Le Fils, are profoundly political. After all, Francis is society's son--how do we, as citizens, wish to punish and/or reform such a person? Can we accept him as a citizen again?

[Illustration omitted.]

All of the Dardenne brothers' films involve betrayal at their heart--Igor going against his father, Rosetta telling the waffle-shop owner about Riquet's scam so she can take over his job, Olivier building up a trust with Francis that is based on a lie--and their films increasingly require us to betray our own deeply conditioned tele- and cinevisual sense of sympathy or empathy. The oblique camera angles, the focus on gestures rather than pat, transparent words of emotion, and the relentless, non-judgmental immersion in a distinctly comfortless, non-bourgeois world force most viewers to go against the grain of their will to sympathize and so judge the central character.

With their latest film, L'Enfant (2005), the Dardennes push their style and politics even further, forcing us to reconsider the bourgeois idea of charity and the fundamental dynamic of the capitalist system itself. Again, the camera shows us what we would see if we happened to be passing by one of the characters, but also drops away from faces to show gestures and movements that we might not notice. The camerawork in L'Enfant most clearly differs from Le Fils in the medium and long shots it offers; we see Bruno (Jeremie Renier) across a street or spot him walking along a bridge. The effect is twofold: to suddenly jar us back into our usual bourgeois distance and detachment from the down-and-out on city streets, and to offer a brief, illusory respite for the audience before plunging us again into Bruno's world with stalking, off-centre camera shots. The distancing shots are also countered by the brothers' startling cuts between childish romance and harsh street life: a playful scene of Bruno play-wrestling with his girlfriend Sonia (Deborah Francois) in a park cuts to Bruno asking one of his hired thieves, "Have I ever screwed you?"; a shot of Sonia smiling as she mimics modeling a jacket just like Bruno's cuts to Bruno looking wary as they register the baby at town hall.

While the cuts jerk us back down into the mire of Bruno's life, the medium shots are the brief equivalent of coming-up-for-air because Bruno's main act of betrayal is, on the face of it, the most perverse, incomprehensible, odious act documented in the Dardenne brothers' four films--he sells his own child. Bruno is a mini-Fagin, a fence who has two boys steal for him; Sonia, out of hospital after giving birth to their son Jimmy, shows him the baby boy while he is more interested in a possible street theft that he is trying to coordinate. Living hand-to-mouth and often sleeping under cardboard in a shack by the river, Bruno quickly spends most of the money he gets from selling stolen goods (he has even let Sonia's apartment while she was in hospital). After one good haul, he buys a stroller for Jimmy and rents a convertible for a day, taking the three of them out to a park. The woman to whom he sells his takings mentions that families looking to adopt are willing to pay a large sum for a newborn. So one day, while Sonia is waiting in a long line for a government assistance cheque, he takes the baby for a walk, makes a call on his cellphone, places Jimmy in an empty room in a tenement building, where the baby is taken in exchange for 5000 Euros, and then Bruno returns to his shack. When Sonia meets him, he casually tells her he's sold their child.

Sonia's reaction is to faint, and the bourgeois audience's response may well be to retreat into a refusal to care about Jimmy or a growing disgust with him. The Dardennes do not care, but relentlessly forge on: the camera continues to follow Bruno as he desperately tries to get the baby back, seemingly more motivated by Sonia's revelation of his son-selling to the police than by any glimmer of conscience; Bruno gets Jimmy back, but he must pay the thuggish go-betweens 5000 Euros in Sunday instalments in return for their loss of profit, or else. The Dardennes offer little background to their characters and thus little context to hold onto, but rather than this lack of context erasing distinctions between or "normalizing images of violence" (233), as Arthur Kleinman argues, such a tight focus strips the Western bourgeois viewer of the opportunity to target an easy answer as to how Bruno ended up the streets--context can easily be reduced to "choice" rather than circumstance, and so the subject can be deemed unworthy of sympathy. (8)

By stripping the story down to an incredibly dire, tense situation, in which a young man who survives by stealing sees no problem in selling off his own son, the Dardenne brothers expose the bottom end of the capitalist system--Bruno sees a potential profit in everything. His heartless act is only the logical, trickle-down ebb of a heartless system. L'Enfant is interested in what hunger and poverty reduces the most needy and desperate to, not whether or not Bruno is likeable. But most bourgeois viewers need comfortable shoes to step into, and Bruno seems too unsympathetic and inscrutable. We see Bruno and Sonia wolf down food, or the couple rub heads together like ragamuffin twins, or Bruno slop his sneakers in mud to mark how high he can jump up against a wall, but when we watch him with the stroller on the bus, en route to selling the baby, his face becomes a mirror of our own will to sympathy: we want to read into his features and see panic, or a glint of uncertainty, or even growing remorse. The Dardennes offer dialogue that only further fends off compassion, as when Bruno says, in response to Sonia's query about getting a job, "No way, only fuckers work," or when, after he's sold and then got Jimmy back, he begs Sonia to take him back and, even after she closes her door on him, he knocks on it, asking for some money and food. Many of us, in these moments, want to shut down, turn away, condemn the character, and forget the film.

With L'Enfant, then, the Dardenne brothers film a situation so openly resistant to bourgeois notions of sympathy for the down-and-out--between heists, we see Bruno go around asking for change with the stroller, as it increases his beggar-marketability to passersby--that we want to take the film at face value, to dismiss Bruno as a lazy, thieving, selfish man-child unworthy of the charity of our gaze. Those first two adjectives are in fact contradictory--although Bruno may not be interested in a paycheque job, he is constantly planning and working, roving the streets in search of his next mark, calling his workers on his phone, haggling with fences, customers, and the boys who steal for him, begging for change, and even inventively fixing the wire frame for the hood of the stroller; in fact, when he sells Jimmy, he sells the only thing he's helped to make. Such activity is not, apparently, considered by many people--see critics' reactions below--to be "work," or at least certainly not the productive, admirable, moral kind of salaried work. What Bruno does not do is plan ahead--he spends most of his earnings right away, truly living hand-to-mouth, because he can't see much of a future, as emphasized by a shot of him being beaten up in a narrow entryway or the shots of him in darkened, small, bare spaces.

We want, as bourgeois viewers, to judge Bruno as a reckless, selfish thief who sometimes even wastes his money on gambling, but the effects of Bruno's actions snowball--the buying and selling of a baby, the hospitalizing of Sonia, Bruno's vicious beating, the endangering of a boy in a chase after a heist--hurtling the story far beyond the warm blanket of "trying to understand what someone is going through." Yet most negative reviews of the film still evince a strong desire to dismiss Bruno as unworthy of sympathy--he is too stupid and/or base. (9)

Matt Pais' review is viciously bourgeois-conservative; subtitled "Worst. Dad. Ever.", Pais offers eugenics in lieu of criticism--"Does this Cannes prizewinner prove that children shouldn't have children?"--draws on the welfare-bum stereotype in noting that the movie's only worth seeing if "You need motivation to pick a career," and reduces the film to a moral that exposes Bruno's apparent lack of intelligence (and thus, presumably, his lack of fitness as a father): "Bruno learns that his actions have consequences (duh)." Since the main character "doesn't seem to feel anything, neither will you."

Boyd van Hoejj's review is initially fair, but he misunderstands Bruno's selling of Jimmy and the obviously capitalist-industrial-production language of his excuse (according to van Hoejj, Bruno explains, "I thought we could always make another one" [my emphasis] (10)) as an "extension of [Bruno's and Sonia's] fun and games," with Jimmy as a "pawn." van Hoejj's criticism hinges on Bruno as a "particularly unlikeable protagonist":

"The Dardennes have rarely created a more depraved character and the
ugliness and eventual redemption that await Bruno in the latter part
of the film are only of minor interest since it is so hard to
identify with him.... The most interesting character is Sonia, but
she is strictly seen from Bruno's perspective ... Does he really
deserve to be redeemed?
". . . L'Enfant unfortunately suffers from a particularly unlikeable
protagonist and the sky-high expectations that come with a Palme
d'or; add to that the distinct sensation of "been there, seen that"
and the film can only be considered as a minor entry on the
Dardennes filmography."

George Wu inverts the usual approach by arguing that Bruno's actions can only be excused by his idiocy or callousness, but the film "does not present any convincing evidence that Bruno is either so dense or so uncaring as to be remotely capable of selling his son on a whim." The actor Renier's "essential decency" makes "his character's transgression" unbelievable. Yet what of the capitalist system surrounding Bruno? Another critic entrenched in the system's "reasonable" rhetoric of empathy, judgment, and choice, Wu so ignores the obvious climate of callous capitalism that has raised Bruno that he in fact suggests deeply bourgeois and oh-so-reasonable (i.e., responsible, right, intelligent, and moral) possibilities for Bruno's callousness that the Dardennes should have used, possibilities that seem to come from a brochure about the downsides of starting a family: "the time-consuming responsibilities of raising a child . . . stress and nagging from an inexperienced mother, the financial costs overwhelming his means--but none of this is addressed." Wu, like other critics, wants a framework of "reasonable," middle-class context in which to pin Bruno down--they want to understand where Bruno comes from, in order to better track his missteps and judge his choices. Ultimately, like Pais, Wu must reduce the refusal-to-judge-mentality of the film and its milieu to not only an easy moral but a formula: "one has to wonder how much longer the brothers can fruitfully milk their working-class-folks-finding-themselves-in-existential-moral-quandary stories."

Richard Roeper, on his TV movie review show with Roger Ebert, likewise breezes over the obvious socio-economic context of the film and calls Bruno someone "with a dull imagination, a small conscience, and kind of a tiny brain . . . to this idiot, selling the child seems a natural extenion of his daily hustle." To Roeper, the film seems to be a sort of Euro-drama Jackass, with "scene after scene of them being stupid," especially since "there is a little bit of a chance there for them" to get a job--why don't they simply disregard their circumstances, their conditioning, their habits, an internalized sense of capitalism at its most basic, and make the right choice? While Ebert opposes Roeper's thumbs-down verdict, he himself uses the rhetoric of Hollywood voyeuristic cinema in noting that the film has "got a very intent gaze" and concludes, "I agree they're idiots . . . this is about stupid people doing dumb things."

The most sophisticated and airily unimpressed of the negative reviews comes from New Yorker critic Anthony Lane, whose criticism is rife with snobbery. He effectively disparages the pair's obvious love--"you would struggle to describe [Sonia and Bruno] as a couple"--and remarks of Bruno, "the Devil seems to have entered his spirit and drained it of charm." The language of sin here is, while partly tongue-in-cheek, revealing and Lane reiterates van Hoejj's wish that they see more of Sonia--a bizarre, perhaps sexist-voyeuristic desire, since the moral dilemma and central tension of the story entirely resides within and is fuelled by Bruno. Subsituting his own "misplacement" with another, Lane writes that making "the directors' decision to make Bruno the focus of their concern seems entirely misplaced."

Lane fundamentally misunderstands the nature of the Dardennes' films. They are not "concerned" with the dispossessed, down-and-out, but with offering, as best possible, a drama that simply documents a crucial moment or crisis in an underclass worker's life. The inclination for concern, empathy, judgment, and evaluation--clearly staples of not just audiences, but film reviewers, though the chicken-and-egg question could be raised here: do reviewers in large part create and/or exacerbate viewers' will to empathy?--comes from the viewer and it is precisely this impulse that the Dardennes are testing.

Lane's review is, essentially, a more erudite phrasing of Pais' concerns. After all, Lane concludes, Bruno is a "half-wit stuck in adolescence." In the bourgeois rhetoric, a lack of intelligence is virtually interchangeable with a lack of substance, depth, and morality, and so adds up to a character who is entirely lacking interest and a wasted subject for a film. Pais' main problem with the movie is that Bruno "never shows a hint of emotion towards his son. He's a convincing and well-drawn prick, but his redemption doesn't feel earned." Lane writes that "Viewers in Europe have swooned, it is said, at this movie's painful inching toward redemption." His half-ironic, half-snooty description of those in the Old World "swooning" is based on an unknown source, but his concern with redemption is reflective of a number of critics' conclusions about the film's ending, and this need to see Bruno as a not-too-far-gone figure or worthy of "redemption" exposes the roots of Old Testament, Judeo-Christian judgmentalism beneath the creeping bourgeois notion of sympathy, that metaphorical extension of holier-than-thou charity to the lost soul on screen.

The wish for redemption at the end of the film shows how frustrated many critics are in their will to sympathy as they watch L'Enfant; they eagerly return to the idea that the film has been worth watching because it offers a sense of--or, to Lane, Pais, and others, that it is a flawed film because it doesn't sufficiently show--Bruno's discovered virtue/hope/conscience at last. So the callous man-child is now a redeemable, likeable figure.

Yet the final scene is moving simply because it is a moment of naked emotion. As in the final shot of Rosetta, where a stubborn, job-scrabbling girl finally breaks down, we see the removal of Bruno's tough, street-hardened mask for an instant, and his burst into tears reveals his sense of despair, and/or sadness, and/or heartbreak at being in prison and away from Sonia. Bruno also finally shows some concern for Jimmy, asking about him, but this does not suggest any sort of redemption, but simply hints at a possible maturity (already evidenced by Bruno turning himself in), perhaps prodded still further by his time in prison, the only place where society now must take an interest and recognize its stake in Bruno; Bruno's last home in the film emphasizes that he is as much a citizen as the viewer and that we have a basic political duty to be interested in his story. (11)

The point is that we cannot know precisely why Bruno cries or what he feels. And that is the basic drive behind the Dardenne brothers' film--not to make you connect, or relate, or feel for a character--but to realize that you cannot know, to surrender to the truth that, as a viewer, you are not a woman trying to get a job at a waffle stand, or a man mentoring his son's killer, or a young man selling his own child, but that, for ninety minutes, you can watch a woman trying to get a job at a waffle stand, or a man mentoring his son's killer, or a young man selling his own child. The least, indeed only, position we can take in these chronicles of people struggling to get by, is as witness, not judge. The Dardennes simply turn our attention to those we would usually ignore or think nothing of, as in Rosetta, where they explained in an interview with Richard Kelly, "in our look Rosetta sees she has a right to be there, that she belongs in society" (24). This is not the gaze of evaluation or dismissal, but the look as a conferral of dignity and respect. Here is cinema that directs the viewer to step outside his or her bourgeois Self and defer to the Other because that should offer a chance at re-evaluating the Self in relation to others and the system of power, rather than allow for increased efforts to justify, preserve, and retreat into one's privileged, comfortable, long-inhabited system of power. The Dardennes attempt, then, to remove the bourgeois viewer from his or her bubble of desensitization by sabotaging their usual response of conveniently displacing emotions (whereby, for instance, sympathy can lead unconsciously to: relief that you're not in that person's shoes, judgment as to why that person is there, convenient compartmentalization/labelling of that person, then moving on to apathy and self-satisfaction). In Caché, a film that competed with L'Enfant at Cannes in 2005, Michael Haneke offers a thriller set in a more specific historical moment which also explores a cycle of displacing emotions even as it more provocatively and disturbingly confronts the bourgeois viewer's desire to empathize, understand, explain, and control.


Beyond Empathy: Bourgeois Self-Reflection in Caché

"All of us have such hidden corners in our lives, we all feel guilty,
about the relationships between the industrialized world and the
third world . . . But each of us pulls the blanket over our heads and
hopes that the nightmares won't be too bad."
- Michael Haneke, in an interview with Karin Badt at Cannes, May
2005

Caché begins by thoroughly unsettling the viewer's expectations of the camera itself as a reliable eye. The opening image is a long shot, from an alleyway, of a house, and it seems to be an "objective" or "omniscient" POV shot, since the film's credits scroll across it in fine print. This shot runs for nearly three minutes and then we hear two people in voiceover, who seem to be talking about the shot itself. The camera cuts to a man leaving the house we had been looking at, in order to go out and try to see the position in the alley where the camera had been. Then we see the long shot of the couple's house again, but now one of them rewinds the image, and we realize that our position has been wrong--we are looking at a tape made by someone else. Thus Haneke infuses not just the story--ostensibly a thriller--but the very medium of the film itself with uncertainty and threat; the recorded shots are taken from fixed positions, but the objective shots are often still, too, and the camera moves little, following characters slowly. We watch an image, unsure of whether it is an objective/omniscient POV shot in the narrative present or a "subjective" shot recorded by someone else in the narrative past (and possibly being watched not only by us at the moment, but by one of the characters in the film in the narrative present). We may well, like Georges (Daniel Auteuil) and Anne (Juliette Binoche) in the film (12)--particularly in light of a fascinating detail hidden in the final shot of the film--rewind parts of the film ourselves in an effort to spot clues about who is sending the tapes to them and why. And so Haneke also undermines the usual power of cinema to offer "a satisfying sense of omnipotence," usually via a powerful male protagonist (Mulvey 20), while unsettling our sense of camera point-of-view, as in his Code Inconnu, thus "depriving us of critical [and judgmental] distance" (Wood 42).

The setting of the film, though, seems to offer surer ground and appeal to our empathy, where we wish to feel with the protagonists, for they are like us. Georges' and Anne's house is large and well-appointed, a space we're used to seeing as the bourgeois backdrop in countless mainstream films. The markers of material and intellectual success are all there: a gated courtyard out front; a beautiful kitchen inside; dinner parties with friends; bookcases stacked with spines of various texts; an expensive, recently bought car. These, then, are smart, upper-middle class, hard-working people we can relate to, even aspire to. They may fight a little, their friends may try a little too hard to be witty conversationalists, but this urban, bourgeois, intellectual milieu is recognizable, understandable, even desirable in some ways. Anne and Georges' lives here, as in Code Inconnu, are "the closest to the experiences of the majority of the film's potential spectators (white, western, middle-to-upper class, the 'arthouse' audience), hence [they are] the character[s] whose experiences, actions, decisions we can most readily relate to our own" (45).

As the film progresses, though, our innate empathy--bolstered, of course, by the camera's attention to Georges (we are even shown his dreams) and the sense that he is being threatened by person(s?) and forces unknown--is shaken. The videotapes, first of the house, then of the house at night, then of Georges' childhood home, then of a tenement apartment in Paris, continue to arrive, wrapped in child-like drawings of a man vomiting blood. Georges seems to know what the drawings refer to, but he covers up, even lying to his wife about the man he meets at the apartment, until she plays a new tape that's arrived, a tape that's recorded their meeting, continuing for an hour after Georges leaves, when Majid cries. Georges still won't tell her his "hunch," and he is now lying so often he seems sociopathic. When the truth leaks out of him--the man is Majid, the son of Algerian farmhands at Georges' parents' estate who was orphaned when his parents were killed at a 1961 demonstration in Paris; Georges was jealous of the boy getting his own room and taking attention away from him, so he probably lied about the boy coughing up blood and certainly lied about Majid threatening him, convincing his parents that he be taken away--we begin to realize that the six-year-old Georges, mirroring France's treatment of the colony (recall Pontecorvo's Battle of Algiers) and Algerians at home, unthinkingly demonized this Other in his midst, ensured that he would have a poorer education, denied him access to a middle-class world of greater opportunity, and protected his advantageous status as a privileged, white, bourgeois male. Now, though, inexcusably, when faced with his guilt, Georges continues to demonize Majid, certain that he is sending the tapes. Even after he goes to Majid's apartment and watches, aghast, as the man repeats that he is innocent and slits his throat in front of him, he does not report the death to the police (in fact, it is never clear if he reports the death, nor is it clear if the shot of Majid killing himself is from an objective POV or the POV of the recorder's hidden camera--it's from the same angle and place as the earlier recording of Majid's and Georges' first meeting). And when he is followed to his office by Majid's son (the adoption of a bourgeois, polite, reasonable tone by Majid and his son in their conversations only further unnerve Georges), he takes him aside, into the men's room, angrily declaring to the orphan:

"You're sick. You're as sick as your father. I don't know what dumb
obsession he fed you but I'll tell you this. You'll never give me a
bad conscience about your father's sad or wrecked life. I'm not to
blame! Do you get that? If ever you try to hurt me or my family,
you'll regret it."

With this vicious, arrogant rant to a young man who's just lost his father - in part because of Georges initiating their arrest by police because he suspected that they had kidnapped or hurt his missing son, Pierrot (who in fact stayed overnight at a friend's house but didn't call)--any lingering empathy we may have had for Georges is gone. Georges' clear threat to Majid's son makes us realize that the bourgeois world we have been witnessing is the home front in acts of one-way, pre-emptive class warfare. The difference between objective and subjective POVs is echoed in the disparity between Georges' and Majid's worlds, a gap that now, with Georges' blasphemous, hateful words, seems truly obscene. Georges feels threatened when his family's enclave is taped and then those tapes enter his bastion of power; he is resentful when Anne brings up the tapes in front of company; when his TV show producer receives a tape, he is worried about the damage to his professional status and public image; he assumes Majid is trying to extort money from him with the tapes; he turns on Majid's son in the men's room because the young man calls out to him in his workplace, to Georges' embarrassment and professional shame. The genre of the thriller, the mystery of "whodunit?" and the uncertainty of who is behind the camera leads the empathetic bourgeois audience to worry about the mysterious threat to Georges as we buy into his and Anne's apparent, constant "concern" for themselves and their son, which is actually a concern for holding onto their world of privilege, a successful life ensured by his betrayal of Majid when they were young. "It's not your concern," he tells her when trying to keep the nature of his "hunch" from her, and she retorts, "If it's not my concern, business as usual. Would you like dinner? Or perhaps I can get you another drink?" In her sarcasm, Anne hits on the true sore spot, but then retreats into worrying again about, as Haneke puts it in the interview included on the DVD, "the false ideal of the family, to keep secrets as they are, to deal only with the husband's secret" and hide her own, rather than condemn Georges' past actions concerning Majid (we don't see either of them show any concern for Majid when he cries on the tape; Anne has seen it already or fast-forwarded through it, she stops playing it, and they start to argue). For the real threat has come from self-justifying Georges all along, with his instinctive, almost feral, need to preserve his privilege, to hold onto his upper-middle-class turf and keep its trappings from becoming truth-revealing traps.We now realize that our second, more certain position, that of where we stand as viewers in empathetic relation to the plight of Georges and Anne, is as false as our assumptions about the camera.

We see just how flimsy Georges' and Anne's propped-up world is. After all, their living- and dining-rooms, surrounded by bookcases, resemble the set constructed for Georges' TV show. The dinner parties mirror the staged, edited conversations on the show (at one point, we watch the show only to realize it is not "live," but a tape that Georges is helping to cut and edit, another reminder by Haneke of the selectiveness of memory, the fragmentary nature of reality, and the impossibility of objective truth). The Laurents' work and home routine is like a loop of video footage; we see Pierrot, who is on the school swim team, practice his turns off the pool wall over and over. In his stubborn efforts to protect his family by not telling Anne, for a long time, and never telling Pierrot the truth of what he did to Majid, Georges suggests that he sees his family as both the ultimate and most illusory symbol of his upper-middle class success. (Perhaps more illusory than he knows, as it's suggested that Pierrot may not be his son, but the child of Anne and her lover Pierre, who, in another indictment of the public-private blurring, incestuous world of upper-middle class privilege, is also Anne's boss; Georges says to his mother, "Her boss is a friend of ours," and she replies, "Very handy.") When Georges fails to resolve matters himself, he can fall back on his bourgeois world for help: he got his parents to turn to an orphanage to remove Majid when they were young; now he turns to the police in order to harass and arrest Majid and his son; he turns to the medical establishment for pills that can ease his nerves. In response to his covered-up guilt, he continues to demonize the boy he had got rid of all those years ago, claiming that even now "he has a pathological hatred of my family" and that Majid is still convinced he was hard done by. Yet the hypocritical, self-righteous Georges' dishonesty about his past crime, to himself, his family, and to Majid, is what has led to the surveillance and sinister sketches; indeed, his and our concern for Pierrot ironically blind us to the possibility that Pierrot is the concern (Pierrot is sent a card with one of the sketches on it, but we do not know if he or Majid's son did so to avert suspicion from him or them, or if the videotaper sent it to him in order to make Georges afraid for his son). After Georges' dream-like memory of Majid taken away from his home against his will (shot at the same distance as the tapes of the Laurents' home, thus visually connecting the surveillance and its motivation) comes the film's final shot, held for minutes, with the credits rolling over it--the camera, likely adopting an "objective" POV, fixes its gaze on the entrance to Pierrot's school entrance. Once before, in a closer shot, we had seen this place, when Georges had picked up Pierrot, concerned for his safety. A careful viewer now sees that Majid's son enters the shot from the lower right, spots Pierrot coming out of the school with his friends, watches him go up the steps to talk to him, and then observes as they go down the steps and talk together for some time; Majid's son soon goes one way, with Pierrot returning to his friends and then walking off the other way. Have Majid's son and Pierrot been making the tapes all along? Or did Majid's son only involve Pierrot at a later time in his campaign? Or is Pierrot the organizer? In the visual and emotional terms of cinema, the shot suggests that our empathetic focus on the protagonist, Georges, has been misplaced all along. Politically, the shot suggests that we must consider the margins, not just the bourgeois centre of things.

This vicious cycle of twisted patrilineal vengeance--did Majid's son indirectly kill his own father to drive home Georges' guilt?--is all the more pointed because of its echoing of the "war on terror" going on at the time, centred on Iraq, that favourite target of the George Bushes, father and son. (13) As Georges and Anne worry about Pierrot's whereabouts, the TV news between them flashes pictures of hostages or the dead in what seems to be Iraq, images of violence in the Mideast, and a politician's statement about recent problems in India. Majid's suicide is reminiscent not only of the unnecessary killing of the rooster (the national symbol of France), whose head he cut off as a boy at Georges' behest so that George could turn the incident into a tale of Majid threatening him, but a sort of inversion of the hostage-killing videos from Iraq shown on the Internet and on news channels; the surveillance tapes are an inversion of supposedly middle- and upper-class protecting surveillance systems in the West (e.g, England's extensive CCTV network). Anne and Georges blow up the supposed threat to his family--which are only provocative reminders of his guilt--into a campaign of terror: Anne talks of "being terrorized by anonymous calls and those fucking videos!" (we only see her receive one phone call, in which the person merely asks to speak to Georges Laurent); Georges, in his angry first visit to Majid, asks, "Who's been terrorizing my family?"; Georges later defends himself, saying, "My visit was the consequence of his campaign of terror"; Georges tells Majid's son, "I'd advise you to desist from terrorizing us with those stupid tapes," and then rephrases, "You terrorize my family and me with your damn tapes!" In their argument, Georges tells Anne, "You realize you're doing exactly what he wants," echoing the post-September 11 credo of not living in fear, etc., since to do so would mean "letting the terrorists win." Caché implies, then, that past colonialism to enrich, and present pre-emptive strikes to protect, white bourgeois privilege are behind the "war on terror" that is blamed on "Others" who supposedly resent the power and wealth that we, in fact, stripped them of the chance to have long ago.

The complex political dynamic at the heart of Caché's mystery, then, revolves around the upper-middle-class world which Georges and Anne inhabit and to which, to varying degrees, Caché's audience subscribes (whether they aspire to it or inhabit a similar world themselves). For all of Georges' supposed intelligence, a trait that he trades on as a literature-pundit on public television and a quality that, according to bourgeois empathy rhetoric, makes him more moral and likeable--recall critics' condemnations of Bruno in L'Enfant--he never figures out (nor do we) who is sending the tapes, is called an idiot by his own wife, and comes off as blustery, irrational, and odious in front of Majid and Majid's son. In fact, Majid not only sees right through him, but recognizes the pathetic frailty of his position: "Kicking my ass won't leave you any wiser about me. Even if you beat me to death. But you're too refined for that. Above all, you have too much to lose." The real trick, and truth, of Caché lies here: in getting us to not only empathize with Georges, but presume his bourgeois family's innocence and vulnerability from the start, we are complicit in demonizing Majid and his son (the "objective" camera's shots of the father and son in silhouette against the bars of the police van only play into our willingness to see them as the villains). Our will to empathy prevents us from recognizing the person who's truly been demonized, scarred, and unjustly treated--Majid.

The title of the film itself hides the truth by obliquely referring to all that George has to lose (power, wealth, cultural capital, intellectual respectability, status, privilege): "Caché" means "hidden" in French but is a homonym, in English, for "Cachét," or prestige, and is spelled the same as "Caché," a hiding place and also a term referring to computer memory, thus linking the suppressed memories that surface in Georges' dreams with the technology of DVDs, which stores images that can be quickly retrieved, scanned, rewound, etc. And Haneke's playing with subjective and objective POV shots not only puts us in the position of voyeurs of Georges' life, but holds up a metafilmic mirror to our own. How much are we, as bourgeois viewers whose will to empathy has been turned back on us, willing to lose if we are stared down by the Other and confronted with our complicity in their subjugation?

Haneke's confrontation of the viewer hits too close to home for some critics, who resentfully see Haneke's target of them and their bourgeois world as the true threat. Peter Rainer, in a "B+" review in The Christian Science Monitor, revolts against the supposed malice of the director's outlook in an increasingly defensive piece, writing that "in many ways [Haneke's films] are repellent and borderline cruel" and that characters "always come across as pawns in his chess game
. . . there is an undeniable narrowness to Haneke's world view. Why, after all, should the bourgeoisie be almost exclusively blameworthy?" Rather than consider the answer, Rainer concludes, "Haneke has always had it in for the middle class," and that, though a paragraph earlier he notes that, in Caché, at least the characters have a "political justification," he now sees that Haneke's personal "hatred is trussed up as a political statement" in the film. Andrew Sarris, in a quote from his New York Observer review cited on the Rotten Tomatoes website, states that "Too much of the plot's machinery turns out to be a metaphorical mechanism by which to pin the tail of colonial guilt on Georges and the rest of us smug bourgeois donkeys." Armond White's New York Press review is rather more convoluted and at times seems a wilfully naive misreading (not to mention intent on upholding Spielberg's Munich as a far superior film); he argues that Haneke's film "pander[s] to the public's guilt and fears," that "mere recognition of the West's guilt" should not be considered "tantamount to intellectual and moral progress," and that the film itself is not only "conveniently 'remorseful'," but "cannily customized for the empowered middle-class," rather than aimed for and then at them. White resorts to the Aristotelian origins of bourgeois empathy--"Haneke is unconcerned with insurrection or catharsis"--and sees the film as bolstering "the white bourgeoisie's sense of being besieged," rather than a Trojan horse which is built out of white bourgeois empathy and guilt in order to attack it. White misunderstands Haneke's "calm, Kubrick-precise camera placement" as meant to "disrupt the well-heeled couple's placidity," rather than the viewer's, and then himself dismisses Majid and his son as "token" characters who are "boogey men" meant to "prod George [sic] and Anne's insularity," rather than ours; Georges' and our demonization of the underprivileged Other should force us into a closer examination of ourselves and our system of privilege.

The interview with Michael Haneke on the DVD of Caché is itself revealing; the unidentified interviewer asks questions about the elements of the story that have to do with Georges and Annes, as if it is a film about their personal drama, not a film with a larger political point. Haneke still often hints at a larger framework, though, noting that his film is posing the question, "What did we suppress in order to arrive where we are?" He notes that he purposefully leaves the mystery unanswered "so that the viewer can't say, 'Yeah, but [the videotaper] also did' [or] 'He's not without his own faults, either' and therefore better understand [rationalize] Georges' actions. No." Haneke notes the responsibility of the viewer as a sort of witness:

It's up to the viewer not to choose among the possibilities, but to
realize that there are many possibilities. . . . A lot of people who go
to the cinema don't want this sort of thing. This can be a problem
for those educated in mainstream cinema, and who want some guarantee
that, at the end of the film, they can leave and forget what they
have seen.

Caché uses the genre of the mystery-thriller to lure us into trying to solve the casual bourgeois game of the plot--allowing us to analyze, ascertain, figure out, solve, categorize, and incriminate a villainous Other at a safe remove--but the shift from objective to subjective camera positions, in tandem with the reversal of empathy concerning Georges, force us beyond the position of eyewitnesses to the precipice of participation. We become involved; witnesses, after all, must interpret and often try to cope with what they see. The film's appeals to empathy are the mystery's true red herrings, with even the characters exhorting each other to see reality from their harried, panicky perspective; when Anne is arguing with Georges, she tells him, "Imagine the shoe's on the other foot," while Georges retorts, "If you could hear yourself!" We realize we are like Anne and Georges when we are searching for clues in the tapes or on screen; by watching with them, we become complicit with them, to the point where many viewers even resist condemning Georges and still want a simple, demonizing solution--Majid or his son sent the tapes. "You haven't changed," Majid tells Georges, but we must, as responsible, witnessing viewers. As with Olivier in Le Fils--Luc Dardenne notes that "Olivier realizes that he was almost caught in a repetition. For us the film is about how to get out of this repetition" (West 15)--we must break the violent bourgeois loop of guilt, displacement, demonization, and self-justification. Yet an honest, clear-eyed viewer should move beyond voyeurism to witnessing, and these events on screen should bring self-reflection: Why did we wish to see "reality" from Anne's and Georges' perspective for so long? Why didn't our allegiances shift or even disappear when we saw Majid crying, or when he cut his own throat? Why do we go along with Georges' bourgeois concern with legal guilt as imposed by the privilege-protecting establishment, and not concentrate on Georges' emotional and ethical guilt, which is what matters, as Haneke himself points out? Why do we wish to know for certain who sent the tapes, perhaps even searching for someone to pin down and blame after the film has ended, misdirecting our outrage? Why do we want to know what Pierrot and Majid's son are saying to each other? Or do we even instinctively wish to empathize--or shut off our will to empathize--with the Dardennes' protagonists and with Georges precisely in order to enter--or numb ourselves to--a paralyzing cycle of complicity? Haneke's film reveals, in its implication of the white bourgeois-empathetic viewer, that the blindnesses, faults, and threats lie within the Self, not the Other; the Other, like Majid or his son, is just a displacement of the problems within the bourgeois Self, as epitomized by Georges. It does not matter if we don't see Majid's son and Pierrot meet at the end, for it is precisely the desire to blame, to compartmentalize, to demonize and displace, which must be delayed, even avoided. If Majid's son and Pierrot are the culprits, their collusion only suggests that any simple-minded, violent reprisal for past bourgeois violence against the Other is bound to repeat and feed into a violent cycle of empathy-led displacement, guilt, and judgment.

With Le Fils and L'Enfant, and with Caché, the Dardenne brothers and Haneke suggest a way out of the trap of the bourgeois viewer's sympathy- and empathy-led consolidation of privilege, offering both self-criticism and a chance to "extend the unique energy of one's desires and experiences into an active engagement with the world" (Morgan 534). If, as Kleinman notes, "the mediatization of violence and suffering creates a form of inauthentic social experience: witnessing at a distance, a kind of voyeurism in which nothing is acutely at stake for the observer," a cinema in which "We are outside the field of responsibility; we need feel nothing, risk nothing, lose nothing ... We consume images for the trauma they represent, the pain they hold (and give?)" (232), the Dardennes and Haneke turn the gaze into an act of witnessing with renewed political force. They attempt to break down this distance, to confront their audience with their complicity, to revolt against viewer expectations, and to avoid the comfortable resolution of redemption, but in a way that offers a chance for the viewer to take another look at themselves by seeing film differently. Lauren Berlant argues, in talking about the "normativity hangover" after watching the Dardennes' films, that the characters' quest for inclusion in a respectable work world is about trying "to make reliable a feeling of belonging" and that the children Igor's, Rosetta's, Francis' and Bruno's deeply ambiguous gestures towards some sort of reciprocity, connection, or mutual acknowledgement break down any easy binaries of us vs. them or empathizing audience vs. pitiful victim. Just because the Dardennes--and Haneke--avoid redemptive humanist endings, then, doesn't mean they aren't suggesting a different sense of hope or optimism.

In departing from the diegetic effect--especially through extremely mobile camerawork and unstable POVs--the Dardennes and Haneke no longer make it "possible to witness suffering without experiencing that conflict with one's sense of responsibility that overcomes" one (Tan 241). "Resisting the diegetic effect means depriving oneself of the gratification of all the concerns that can be realized by films" (249), concerns that are typically bourgeois power-endorsing. These films are, in their violent, revolting use of the camera, turning on the bourgeois gazer and demanding that they take the first step in political resistance--looking within. These are not films that are projecting the "self onto the other" but films that are disturbingly destabilizing "the boundaries of the self" by attacking cinema's endorsement of "liberal empathy, which, like liberal guilt, is generally superficial, and ineffectual ... [it] never really considers the standpoint of the other or acknowledges different experiences because it never questions its own assumptions or prejudices or the importance of larger social forces and structures of power" (Siomopoulos 15). As Siomopoulos points out, Hannah Arendt argued that compassion is a poor basis for social justice because it relies solely on "redistribution of both sympathy and resources," rather than "active public discussion . . . Discourses of compassion make deliberation impossible because they collapse the difference between sufferer and audience, other and self, and thus make dialogue seem unnecessary" (18-19). In starkly confronting the viewer with the difference between Self and Other, in erasing the viewer's will to empathy and sympathy, and in turning the gaze on those who are looking at the screen, answering Kiarostami's call to implicate the audience, the Dardenne brothers and Michael Haneke are pointing the way towards an inner revolt, and hopefully a growing public dialogue, about the violent, limited, imperial outlook of bourgeois empathy. (14)

Brian Gibson wrote his Ph.D. dissertation on the fiction of Saki. He is a university teacher and film critic in Edmonton; he has published articles on The Sopranos and Dogme 95.


Notes

1 Examples are too numerous to mention, but some of the most obvious Hollywood films in recent years to showcase the material trappings of a white bourgeois world are Panic Room, Something's Gotta Give and Spanglish.

2 In "art cinema" there is, of course, a long tradition of challenging bourgeois audience expectations, particularly in Europe--see, for instance, von Trier's work and Lukas Moodysson's last two films, A Hole in My Heart and Container. The Dardenne brothers' and Haneke's Caché, however, come from the vein of docudrama, whereby a concentrated, intently staring documentary sensibility is fused with a basic dramatic narrative; Pontecorvo's The Battle of Algiers is an excellent early example of this kind of film.

3 A recent metafilmic movie that is conventionally voyeuristic is Click, where Adam Sandler finds himself in possession of a remote control that allows him, for instance, to fast-forward through foreplay with his wife or look at a passing jogger's breasts in slow-motion.

4 The distinction between sympathy and empathy is worth considering for this essay, where few viewers would be able to empathize with Rosetta, Olivier, or Bruno, as they are all part of an underclass or lower class (and, in Olivier's case, feels grief about a very particular, unusual death), but most would be able to empathize with Anne and Georges in Caché, as they are of their class. Yet Neill fails to take into account the tremendous importance of both viewers' and characters' socio-political positions, preferring to stick too closely to the aesthetic, Platonic notion of catharsis (pity and fear); he also seems to assume that sympathy and empathy cannot be mixed. The essay offers an unduly optimistic, Enlightenment view of empathy as necessarily part of the "education of emotion" (250), as though emotion should be harnessed and taught in some sort of logical manner. The thrust of Neill's essay, then, is that empathy is good and leads to understanding, yet he ignores the possibility that we use empathy as an egotistical leap--a means of displacing, justifying, excusing, validating, and/or prioritizing our own experiences, status, and actions while pitying or fearing for the Other. It is noteworthy that Neill focuses more on what empathy can supposedly teach us about the Other than about the Self in his concluding section (257-58). For more on empathy and sympathy in film-watching, see Berys Gaut's Identification and Emotion in Narrative Film and Deborah Knight's In Fictional Shoes: Mental Simulation and Fiction, in Carroll's and Choi's 2006 collection, Philosophy of Film and Pictures: An Anthology. There have also been scientific efforts to better understand viewers' empathy; see, for instance, Tan's book and the many scientific papers listed within or Ron Tamborini's, Kristen Salomonson's, and Changmo Bahk's paper The Relationship of Empathy to Comforting Behavior Following Film Exposure, Communication Research 20.5 (October 1993): 723-38.

5 Other drama filmmakers are challenging viewers' expectations with hand-held, oblique-angled camerawork, most notably American director Lodge Kerrigan's recent film Keane, about a mentally disturbed man preoccupied with getting custody of his daughter. The title character is as capable of beating up a stranger while in a cocaine-induced paranoiac state as he is of babysitting a motel neighbour's daughter while she is gone for a night, defying easy assumptions about mental illness, particularly in relation to the safety of children--the bourgeois viewer, conditioned by sensational media reports on pedophilia and kidnapping, constantly worries that Keane will molest or otherwise harm the girl.

Paul Greengrass' United 93, another of his docudrama recreations of historical events, offers no protagonists but only mass confusion and chaos on both sides in the doomed flight, thus undercutting the desire to demonize the hijackers.

6 Indeed, in the brothers' interview with Joan M. and David West, Jean-Pierre Dardenne notes that that their filming of Oliver from behind may make the viewer, "when you see a face . . . really look at it--more than you would if you had been looking at it all the time," while Luc Dardenne suggests that the camera's view suggests Olivier's as-yet-unexposed burden: "observing him from behind we see something private and peculiar to him" (17).

7 Luc Dardenne refuses to clarify the ending while noting that it is about absence: "the greatest lesson Olivier gives the teenager is not killing him. . . . Perhaps this is the reason why Francis approaches Olivier at the end, because Olivier does not kill him" (15).

8 There is, though, a short scene where Bruno goes to his mother's house to ensure she'll provide an alibi for him, and we see that she seems to be in an abusive relationship; it is implied that Bruno grew up in a broken home.

9 It should be noted that most of the harsh reviews which I cite do offer one legitimate cavil--Jimmy's near-silence throughout undercuts L'Enfant's realism. His quietness does, however, accentuate his objectification by Bruno and us, the bourgeois audience--we come to see Jimmy as a thing.

10 van Hoejj may be offering his own translation of the French. In the version I saw, the subtitles translated Bruno's words as: "What did I do? I thought we'd have another."

11 It is interesting that reviewers wish to see the final scene as a moral moment of redemption, rather than the culmination of Bruno's political acts of responsibility: he admits to the theft, likely clearing Steve's name, he goes to prison, he seems to be slowly accepting his fatherhood, and he may be suggesting, in part, how sorry he is for what he did to Sonia (selling the baby and now being away from her and jimmy) when he weeps and clings to her hands.

12 Haneke's Code Inconnu (Code Unknown) also features a couple named Anne and Georges and its crucial opening scene involves an act of witnessing, wherein Amadou appeals to other pedestrians around him for eyewitness corroborations of his attempt to get Jean, Georges' younger brother, to apologize to a woman panhandling on the street. Some of the actors who plays Anne's and Georges' friends at their dinner party in Caché also appear at a dinner in a fancy restaurant in Code Inconnu. From one film to the other, then, Haneke's repetitive casting and naming suggest the ruts and routines of bourgeois life.

13 The film is clearly an indictment of patriarchy, too, which can neither be unravelled from white bourgeois hegemony nor resolved by the next generation. Georges, who takes the protect-the-family mentality of the patriarch to a murderous extreme in order to cover up his guilt, is reflected in his son, according to Anne, who says Pierrot, like his father, "can be a macho little prick." If Majid's son is making the tapes without Majid's knowledge, then the son has killed his father while trying to avenge and prove Georges' betrayal of Majid, while Pierrot's possible involvement in the video-tapings suggests that he, too, could only break from the repressed crimes of his father by committing his own crimes in response. In fact, the next generation, shown in that final shot of the school emptying, may be more dangerous because of their naive assumption that they can break their parents' patterns or ignore, and so avoid, the past.

14 This is not merely an idealistic sentiment; Rosetta precipitated a debate in Belgium about the employment of young people; the "Rosetta Plan" was proposed by the Minister of Employment in 1999 and put into law not long after, ensuring that businesses with more than 50 workers hire "young [particularly twenty-five and under], low-skilled workers" to make up at least 3% of their labour force (Morgan 534).