CACHE Review

As a thriller I think Cache immediately induces the audience with the visual appeal of a whodunnit. For me there was also a immediate similarity in technique to the French New Wave of the late 1950s and 1960s. The exterior video tapping in the opening gave it a documentary feel at first but we were quickly draw into the mystery of the tapes as a cinematic radical experiment that instigated intrigue to a visual style narrative that breaks away from contemporary Hollywood thrillers. Even the example of the scenes setting in drab blue colors, natural lighting and long takes rolled simultaneously against the discontinued, fragmented editing of the tapes gave tribute to the origin of the movment's theoretical influences. Videocassettes accompanied by the shroud disturbing crayon drawings created an absurdity of George's human existence as the haunted memories of the past made his celebrity life superficial.      

The subjective or objective realism using a child's story as a theme then leaving a questionable ending to the film left me perplexed in this state of stylistic art cinema but I came back to the reality recognizing the control basis of the film was the anonymous source of the video tapes. At the end we see Pierrot the son of George talking to Majid's son at the school while being video tape. Whether or not Cache reveals the hidden figure behind the film seems irrelevant to the fact that it tricks our inner emotion to see what is more menacing?  The symbolic blood of the rooster to France, the failures of our past, or cinematic memories used as device to manipulate and frustrate our future perspective.