Dostoevsky famously railed against Turgenev not for attending an execution, but for being unable to watch the final, grisly moment when the condemned's head was chopped off. "No person has the right to turn away and ignore what happens on earth," Dostoevsky later fumed to a friend, "and there are supreme moral reasons for that."
I am reminded of this Russian literary dispute whenever I watch the films of Michael Haneke, the German-born Austrian director who has managed to achieve simultaneously the status of revered auteur (complete with a MOMA retrospective and Cannes acclaim) and reviled-Austrian-at-large. (Usually, one is first the provocateur, then the master, but Haneke, in a Teutonic coup, has managed to inhabit both roles concurrently). His genius, it seems to me, is to straddle without comprise this Dostoevsky/Turgenev divide: Philosophically, he is the former; formally, the latter. His heart, no doubt, is with Dostoevsky, but he does not (as Dostoevsky surely would if he survived long enough to wield a Hi-Def camera) force us to watch the beheading. Rather, he forces us to watch ourselves turning away from it.
This is another way of saying that Haneke's great interest is in dramatizing repression: the plot of people, especially the high-minded bourgeois, looking away. (It's also another way of saying that for Michael Haneke, the modern cinema--stadium seating, plush red drapes, et. al--is the ideal venue for an execution.) His riveting and deeply unsettlingly 2005 film Caché (literally, hidden) fits snugly into this cinema of suppression. In it, Georges Laurent (Daniel Auteuil), a literary talk show host, is forced to come face-to-face with a past crime, when creepy tapes start arriving on his doorstep (showing that very doorstep being filmed). His dirty secret is this: As a child, he lied to his parents that an Algerian boy, who they had planned to adopt, had beheaded a chicken. This selfish, though ultimately forgivable, childish lie drastically affects the Algerian's life, and Georges, through the arrival of these tapes, is forced to meet this fact.
Yet the plot description, which neatly exhibits a skeletons-dredged-out-of-the-closet-theme, doesn't begin to approximate the mood of repression the film evokes. "Drama," Hitchcock said, "is life with the dull bits cut out." Haneke upends the maxim, casting his unrushed eye upon the "dull bits" with the same exactitude he does the "drama" (and in Haneke, we're talking, drama) so that the second all but grows out of the first. He'll spend as much time on a man uncorking a bottle of wine as a man slitting his own throat. The one act of violence in Caché, when it comes, does so at the pace of the ordinary--and therefore, with a lurching reality. After witnessing this act, Georges drives home, loads up on sleeping pills, draws his sleek curtains, and lies in bed, ensconced in his Parisian apartment. And this--a process as visually uninteresting as an upper-middle-class man preparing for sleep--becomes the most dramatic moment of the film. One gets to see all that Georges is trying not to.