Caché begins with a couple, Georges (Daniel Auteuil), who hosts a television show on literature, and Anne (Juliette Binoche), who works for a publisher. Settled, content, more than a little complacent, they are terrorized by the delivery of videotapes filled with footage of their own house, of their coming and going, of a car driving up to Georges’s rural childhood home. A tape of Georges returning from work arrives wrapped in a childish drawing of a boy with blood spraying from his mouth. This, and other menacing drawings, work in the world of the film both as aides-mémoires for Georges, recalling events from his childhood, and as proleptic hints of what is to come: what we the viewers and Georges himself are going to see before the film has finished. And the anonymous surveillance tapes and menacing drawings are merely the outward signs of a much darker story, which circles around familial inheritances of loss and complicity.
In its exploration of these themes, the film’s dramatization of the failures of bourgeois parenting is as damning as its vision of the psychological effects produced by the traumatic loss of one’s parents is disturbing. Pierrot (Lester Makedonsky), Georges’s and Anne’s young adolescent son, is on the school swim team. We see him at swim practice, trained by his coach, who tells him how to turn differently in the water. As any good teacher, the coach acts in loco parentis, reinforcing methods of repetition and correction that formalize those processes of observation, critique and instruction which are a fundamental aspect not only of much good teaching but also good parenting. Georges and Anne, however, are a little neglectful, a little laissez-faire, even when the threatening communications they receive start to target their son. At school, Pierrot receives a postcard with the drawing of the child spewing blood from its mouth, the card purporting to be from his father, although it is not. That Georges and Anne do almost nothing to safeguard their son in light of this threat is a mark of their complacency, even their failure to parent adequately.
It takes a threat against his ailing mother for Georges to react. After receiving a video shot from the perspective of someone driving to his childhood home, Georges goes to visit his bedridden mother, Mme Laurent (Annie Girardot). She is ill but otherwise all right, tended by a nameless assistant. At his mother’s bedside, Georges confesses to her that he dreams of Majid. At first his mother claims not to know who he means, although we, the viewers, already have a suspicion that Majid (Malik Nait Djoudi) is a child we have seen for an instant earlier in the film, a boy wiping blood from his mouth as though he has been caught eating something bloody, or as if bleeding himself. Majid, the son of Hashem, Georges explains, shocked. Majid, the boy his mother and father planned to adopt. Does she ever think about Majid? No, says Mme Laurent. It is not a happy memory. It was a long time ago.
How could a woman forget the name of the child she was once intending to adopt, even if only momentarily? As the complex details of the Laurents’ past association with Majid and his family are gradually revealed, the question becomes as pressing as it is unarticulated by any of the characters. What made them change their minds?
Georges does not tell his mother about the surveillance tapes, even though the most recent one potentially functions as a threat against Mme Laurent herself – or is at least a message to Georges that whoever is watching him knows where his mother lives, just as they know which school his son attends. They know enough about Georges to unsettle his life, or to try to unsettle his smug self-righteousness.
A series of flashbacks works to explain the meaning and origin of the violent drawings’ imagery: in the courtyard of Georges’s childhood home, Majid cuts off the head of a cockerel with an axe. Blood squirts onto the boy’s face. He tosses the flapping body of the bird across the yard as young Georges (Hugo Flamigni) stands watching. Majid approaches, axe raised, backing Georges against the wall as if intent on chopping off his head as well.
But are these violent images – including the earlier glimpse of Majid with a bloody mouth – actual memories, or are they dreams? Are such glimpses of the child Majid subjective, unreliable distortions of memory or misperceptions? Does Georges remember Majid as he needs to remember him in order to rationalize the way that he betrayed him (as the film later reveals), and indeed goes on betraying him, or is the film offering us an objective account of the boy’s behaviour?
The morning after the conversation with his mother, Georges wakes breathless and sweaty, an adult in the present having spent the night in his haut-bourgeois childhood home, whose grandeur, though shabby, is at last evident. This is a house large enough to contain another life, even many lives, within it. Why, when these people possess so much, did they fail to adopt Majid? What could have compelled them to change their minds? Perhaps the boy’s beheading of a cockerel is explanation enough. And so we, the viewers, settle into our own complacency, passing judgement on the boy whose actions disturb us because the film forces us into sympathy with Georges and his mother, his wife and his son, driving us into a position of privileged complicity as a way ultimately of making us feel our own moral and ethical failures more acutely.
Back in Paris, Georges and Anne receive a new tape shot from the front seat of a car, this time travelling through a working-class neighbourhood before cutting into a tower block and up to a numbered door. Georges and Anne stop and start the video, rewind, replay, trying to read the street signs until Georges is able to follow the tape’s clues to a social housing estate in the Parisian banlieue Romainville. Here Georges finds Majid, now a man in his fifties (Maurice Bénichou), but while Majid recognizes Georges instantly, Georges does not recognize him. In fact, Majid has been watching Georges’s television show for some time and while at first he was unsure why he ‘had a nasty feeling’ in his gut and ‘felt nauseous’ at the sight of the other man’s face, when he saw the name in the show’s credits he understood. He remembers Georges’s parents as kind and generous. It is Georges he blames for what happened. When Georges presents one of the violent drawings he has received, Majid claims ignorance.
This encounter so unsettles Georges that when Anne later asks him what he has found, he tells her that no one answered the door, then inflates the lie by claiming that the building manager said the flat was unoccupied. Anne soon discovers his deception when she receives a video of the encounter that shows Majid consumed by grief after Georges’s departure. Faced with proof of his own bad behaviour (the tape casts Georges, accurately, in a very negative light), he explains to Anne that Majid’s parents worked for the Laurents and were killed in the Algerian War protests in 1961.38 He admits that he was so annoyed by the prospect of his parents adopting Majid that he told lies about the boy until they changed their minds and sent Majid off to a hospital, believing him ill.
Would an orphan’s illness be enough to persuade a wealthy couple not to adopt him, especially because they were already, in some ways, acting as his guardians? Would they not have consulted doctors instead of relying on the reports of their son? Would the biological child’s account of his prospective brother be trusted above the couple’s own observations? And what kind of parents must they have been if they raised a son who could demonstrate such duplicity, such an absence of generosity, such ugly mendacity to an orphan taken in by his parents?
When Pierrot fails to return home from school one evening, Georges leads the police straight to Majid’s flat, convinced that the man must be responsible. There, Majid’s teenage son (Walid Afkir) answers the door. Like his father, he claims to know nothing of the tapes or of Pierrot. Nonetheless, the police take Majid and his son into custody, accusations by an influential white cultural commentator being enough to deny these Algerian-French men their liberty, at least for a night. The outrageousness of the situation suggests that the mere prospect of Majid’s adoption by the Laurents was so horrific to Georges as a child that its recollection in adulthood has driven him mad.
Pierrot turns up with a blasé shrug the next morning, his reappearance exonerating Majid and his son. At work that day, Georges receives a call from Majid, now rele
ased from police custody, asking him to return to Romainville. When Georges arrives, Majid says he had no idea about the tapes. Then, without warning, Majid slits his own throat, spraying blood across the wall, and falls dead to the floor.
As surprising and horrifying as this suicide is – both to Georges and to the viewer – the film has carefully prepared the ground for such an eruption of violence so that we read it as being in keeping with Majid’s character. His passivity in the present, in late middle-age, is what makes the violence initially surprising, but as soon as we consider what we already know of his capacity for violence and combine that with our suspicion that he might have been responsible (even if the film invites us to read the situation in other ways entirely) for violent drawings that both depict the traumatic moments from his and Georges’s childhood and anticipate his own suicide, it becomes possible to rationalize the aggression of this final act as being in character with what we think we already know about him.
This is a man, orphaned as a boy, who was so disturbed by the death of his parents that he engaged in deeply disturbing behaviour, and having discovered the boy (Georges) who could have been his brother now grown into a successful man with a comfortable life, that mental disturbance has (potentially) turned into maniacal stalking and suicide staged to inflict trauma on Georges himself.
Or, more generously, Majid is a man traumatized by the death of his parents, slandered by the boy who would have been his brother, denied a comfortable childhood, living a marginal adult life, hounded by his once-prospective brother now grown into a successful man who brings down the force of the state upon him in a way that is itself so disturbing (because unjust) that he is driven to kill himself.
In either case, the way that Majid ends his life casts judgement on Georges, the insecure jealousy of whose own filial bond, threatened by the prospect of his parents adopting Majid, produced an impulse to deceive, fabricate, manipulate, and so destroy his competitor. Georges finally reveals to Anne how, as a boy, he told his mother that Majid had coughed up blood. When a doctor examined Majid and found nothing wrong, Georges then told the boy that his father wanted him to kill their cockerel. This was a lie, and once the bird was dead, Georges told his parents that Majid had killed it to scare him.
In a later confrontation, Majid’s son accuses Georges of depriving his father of a good education. ‘The orphanage teaches hatred not politeness. But my father raised me well,’ he says, although in fact the son’s attitude is anything but polite: he instead performs an affect of barely contained rage, of public confrontation, and an attempt to shame and embarrass Georges, who, in his own broken and impolite way, refuses to take the blame for Majid’s ‘sad or wrecked life’, refuses to be given a ‘bad conscience’.
At home, having taken sleeping pills, Georges undresses and goes to bed, dreaming of the moment when Majid was taken away to the orphanage. As Majid tries to escape, the couple from the orphanage chase after him, dragging him back to their car while Georges’s parents turn their backs on him. In his unconscious nakedness, Georges can finally see clearly the consequences of his lies, or so we might assume.
The film’s long closing shot, however, further complicates the entanglement of Georges’s and Majid’s lives: outside his lycée, Pierrot meets Majid’s son, talking as if they know each other already, although we cannot hear what they say, and their body language – Majid’s son’s in particular – is difficult to interpret. Is it hostile or friendly? Familiar or introductory? Conciliatory or confrontational? Is there a world in which these two young men might become the brothers their fathers could not be?
Caché’s point, one suspects, is chiefly to do with the legacies of French colonialism, the violence of French society against its Algerian and other immigrants, the nature of privilege and personal complicity in one bourgeois family, and the ways in which the younger generation contains the hopeful possibility of reconciliation or dialogue, even if ‘we’, the older generation, cannot hear the actual language of their exchange. But the film also operates as a story about the risks of trying to combine adopted and biological children in one family. It suggests that even if the prospective adoptee is wanted and himself wishes to be part of this new family, the biological child destined to be the adoptee’s sibling might respond with resentment and outrage provoked by a fear of being displaced or even replaced in the hearts of his parents. We often assume that the adopted child is likely to be the one who suffers attachment problems, but what happens if the biological child does as well, or does so instead of the adopted one?
Even though Caché’s indictment of failure and misdeed is aimed at the film’s privileged white characters, it nonetheless presents a narrative of the prospective adoptee as one predisposed to disturbing behaviour, whether understood as behaviour that disturbs the equilibrium of the adoptive family, or as behaviour that is intrinsically disturbing: killing a cockerel, threatening his prospective adoptive brother with an axe. Given the film’s slippery formal boundaries, it is impossible to know whether what we see of Majid as a child is objectively accurate or only ever subjective and thus radically distorted by Georges’s jealous perspective. The spectre of that distortion is likely part of the film’s point, the images of Majid as a boy unreliable because they are all ostensibly the product of Georges’s unconscious mind. Allowing for the fact that he is virtually a compulsive liar, Georges does admit to telling his parents lies about the other boy. Even if Georges is lying about that, or his mind has produced a distorted vision of Majid, as a man Majid does still commit suicide in an exceptionally disturbing and confrontational way, while his behaviour as a boy, even if not intrinsically disturbing, nonetheless pushed Georges to acts that were, at best, unkind.
One might conclude that it was the French state, or French culture, or racist bourgeois ideology that were ultimately responsible, but the film frames Majid as a boy and as a man who consistently disturbs, who haunts the dreams of the man who might have been his brother, who is intentionally forgotten by the woman who might have been his adoptive mother, about whom she can say only that his presence in her life was the mark of a sad time, while he remembers her as kind and generous. The equation does not balance. It does not seem possible that he was only a victim who saw goodness in those who would have been his parents, or even in the boy who did not wish to be his brother. It is possible to be a victim worthy of sympathy and remain someone whose acts and affects profoundly disturb – even if, one might hazard, those who are disturbed need to be disturbed.
As I watch Caché again on the eve of O—’s anticipated arrival in our life, I find myself standing in multiple positions: in the place of Mme Laurent, Georges’s mother; in the place of Georges; and in the place of Pierrot. I also find myself projecting O— into multiple positions: of Majid as a boy; in the place of Majid as a man; and in the place of Majid’s son.
Here are my newly articulated fears: in bringing this child into our lives, we are introducing a force that will disturb in a way that a biological child would be less likely to do. For the sake of everyone involved, those who exist already and those who exist only hypothetically, I cannot continue to entertain the possibility that after adopting we might one day have a biological child, because to do so would always risk resulting not in the soap-opera fantasy of the happy-ever-after queer family in Brothers and Sisters, but in the failed and fractured non-family of Caché or Agaat, the family that ends not in unity and joy, but in trauma passed down through the generations, intensely complex and unpredictable in its trajectory and effects.
In saying this, I know, too, that there are numberless families that have succeeded in blending the biological and the adopted, but to them I can only look with admiration and awe. It is not a risk I would feel able to take because I can imagine a biological child one day resenting O—’s primary place in our family, or O— one day resenting the arrival of a biological child he might fear would usurp his place in our hearts.
That I can imagine these scenarios means I a
m already, before ever meeting him, anxious about what O— will mean to us and to our future, calculating how I will need to adjust my own hopes so that he has the greatest chance of feeling accepted and loved.
MATCHING
On my return from America, Andrew and I hang black-and-white photographs above the child-sized sleigh bed, choosing pictures we have taken over the years of the Golden Gate Bridge and Table Mountain, images that say something about us, or at least about where we came from, however indirectly. Images we hope will tell O— that his new parents are not from here, that we have pasts in the way that he, too, has a past.
I have wild impulses to buy the most extravagant toys, the biggest and most beautiful of everything. People generously give us books and stuffed animals. A friend in Oxford co-ordinates with her children to select toys they no longer want that can be passed on to us. My mother buys puppets, Andrew’s mother begins knitting sweaters. In all of this activity I recognize the impulse to create a nest of softness and beauty, of rich stimulation. These are not only gifts that we would wish any child to have, but also gifts for the child we hope O— will be.
Megan and Richard have suggested we make a scrapbook to begin familiarizing him with our home, our friends and family, since we will meet only days before he comes to live with us.
In America, such processes are more prolonged, graduated and cautious. Friends in Iowa who adopted a nine-year-old from another state had him visit for a trial weekend to see if they could all get along. (They did.) In Britain, however, the assumption is that social workers will make the determination about whether a couple and the child to be adopted will be a good match for each other, but the two parties only meet in the ‘Introductions’ period immediately prior to the child going to live with the adoptive parents. ‘Introductions’ may last for ten days to two weeks, but are sometimes much shorter, subject to the child’s particular needs and history, how far the foster parents live from the adoptive ones, or how much money the council responsible for the child has to spend on travel and accommodation.
The Ginger Child Page 18