a review of 隐藏摄像机

I love the way Haneke is so confrontational and eager to make his audience uncomfortable. You constantly expect there to be a major twist, but nothing comes along for Georges to blame and unload his guilt on(although there is a bit of a twist in the credit scene). Our expectations are constantly thrown out of whack with the film jumping in and out of different levels of diegesis. The beginning scene makes us feel that it's an establishing shot, but it turns out to be a tape that Georges and Ann are watching from their stalker. This continues to happen throughout the film, including a scene where the camera starts out from the perspective of a camera in Georges' talks how, but then follows George offset and becomes the camera of our main plot with no cut. The movie is filmed with a cinematography style similar to the stalker tapes to make us constantly feel like we aren't completely sure which level of reality we're watching. Then to top it all off, we get no definite resolution to the mystery. It could be the two sons trying to mess with their fathers. Maybe it's Georges subconsciously doing it to try and resolve himself of his guilt. Maybe it's Haneke imposing his will on the film to make the plot move along (which on a meta level, it would be anyway, really), not unlike the remote scene from Funny Games. Even with all this craziness, I constantly was on edge thinking that a madman could jump out at any moment. The way Haneke limits many of the shots of Georges to rarely show the entire room around him made me feel like there was always the possibility of a villain present just off screen. This also plays with our expectations of how a thriller or horror works. We expect the stalker to make their move eventually and jump out, but they can't. That stalker is too busy watching the movie. Also, I enjoyed the way the movie can be viewed as an allegory for the "west's" hegemony over less powerful countries. It makes a direct reference to French-Algerian relations, but also has some less noticeable allusions to the War on Terror. We can view the plot as America and France coming to terms with the guilt caused by their future-altering, racially driven acts against lesser powerful nations in the Middle East and Northern Africa.