Michael Haneke's Hidden (Cache) begins, as many films do, with an exterior establishing shot. We are looking down a narrow Paris street at a nondescript house, fairly certain that cinematic convention will soon invite us inside. But there is something odd about this ordinary, even banal, image. The camera, perfectly still, lingers for an unusually long time, and we begin to suspect we may not be alone. Someone is watching with us, and perhaps even watching us as we watch. It turns out that this is not only the opening shot in a movie, but also part of a surveillance video.
Thus, before we even know what is happening, Haneke, one of the most exquisitely sadistic European filmmakers working today, has deposited his audience at the Hitchcockian junction where voyeurism intersects with paranoia. We are at once innocent and complicit, as if the idle curiosity that brings us into the theater authorized a malignant form of spying. The residents of the house, Georges and Anne Laurent, who have received the video in a bag left on their doorstep, certainly feel violated and intruded upon. Why would anyone do such a thing? What have they -- Georges and Anne, a perfectly respectable upper-middle-class professional couple -- done to deserve this?
The question turns out not to be rhetorical. The tape is followed by others, and by violent drawings made all the more disconcerting by their childishness. Variations on that enigmatic, implacable opening shot pop up again and again, intensifying the ambience of suspicion and multiplying the film's ironies and implications. Georges (Daniel Auteuil) is the host of a highly rated literary talk show on public television (this is France, remember), and is therefore used to the camera's scrutiny. Anne (Juliette Binoche), who works in publishing, finds her husband's response to their invis-ible stalker annoyingly secretive and mistrustful. Their relationship starts to crack and buckle, even as they try to maintain an illusion of blithe bourgeois normalcy for their friends and their 12-year-old son, Pierrot (Lester Makedonsky).
PHOTO COURTESY OF FOX MOVIES
As it happens, their domestic drama has large implications. The film's title gestures at realities that are pushed out of sight so that normal life can take its uneventful course. Normal life, that is, as it is lived by affluent, bien-pensant Western folk like the Laurents. Haneke, an Austrian who works mainly in France (and who makes excellent use of that country's rich deposit of acting talent), has established his reputation by shaming -- and shocking -- the consciences of sophisticated continental audiences. A mainstay of the Cannes Film Festival, where Hidden made its debut last spring, he has acquired considerable cultural prestige as a result of rubbing the smug faces of his characters (and, implicitly, his public) in the depravity, violence and sheer moral ugliness that lurks beneath their comfort and complacency.
Hidden can be interpreted both as a response to the Sept. 11 attacks and, in retrospect, as a prophecy of the riots that convulsed France's impoverished suburbs last fall. What is hidden, above all, from the Laurents and their ilk are the social grievances directed against them. The drawings and videotapes are a form of psychological terrorism, the roots of which lie in Georges's provincial childhood and in the events of Oct. 17, 1961, when as many as 200 Algerian protesters died at the hands of the Paris police, then commanded by the former Nazi collaborator Maurice Papon.
The initial shot of the movie is answered by the last, which demands close attention and contains the intriguing suggestion that the real story has been hidden all along -- that it has been driven not by the noisy public conflict between Arabs and Frenchmen, but rather by the quiet, perpetual war between fathers and sons.
The year was 1991. A Toyota Land Cruiser set out on a 67km journey up the Junda Forest Road (郡大林道) toward an old loggers’ camp, at which point the hikers inside would get out and begin their ascent of Jade Mountain (玉山). Little did they know, they would be the last group of hikers to ever enjoy this shortcut into the mountains. An approaching typhoon soon wiped out the road behind them, trapping the vehicle on the mountain and forever changing the approach to Jade Mountain. THE CONTEMPORARY ROUTE Nowadays, the approach to Jade Mountain from the north side takes an
Last week Joseph Nye, the well-known China scholar, wrote on the Australian Strategic Policy Institute’s website about how war over Taiwan might be averted. He noted that years ago he was on a team that met with then-president Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁), “whose previous ‘unofficial’ visit to the US had caused a crisis in which China fired missiles into the sea and the US deployed carriers off the coast of Taiwan.” Yes, that’s right, mighty Chen caused that crisis all by himself. Neither the US nor the People’s Republic of China (PRC) exercised any agency. Nye then nostalgically invoked the comical specter
Relations between Taiwan and the Czech Republic have flourished in recent years. However, not everyone is pleased about the growing friendship between the two countries. Last month, an incident involving a Chinese diplomat tailing the car of vice president-elect Hsiao Bi-khim (蕭美琴) in Prague, drew public attention to the People’s Republic of China’s (PRC) operations to undermine Taiwan overseas. The trip was not Hsiao’s first visit to the Central European country. It was meant to be low-key, a chance to meet with local academics and politicians, until her police escort noticed a car was tailing her through the Czech capital. The
April 15 to April 21 Yang Kui (楊逵) was horrified as he drove past trucks, oxcarts and trolleys loaded with coffins on his way to Tuntzechiao (屯子腳), which he heard had been completely destroyed. The friend he came to check on was safe, but most residents were suffering in the town hit the hardest by the 7.1-magnitude Hsinchu-Taichung Earthquake on April 21, 1935. It remains the deadliest in Taiwan’s recorded history, claiming around 3,300 lives and injuring nearly 12,000. The disaster completely flattened roughly 18,000 houses and damaged countless more. The social activist and