Foreign Film Festival - Screening of Hidden (Michael Haneke, France 2005 )
Marple and Cheadle College, 7.30pm
A smart marriage of the thriller genre with a compendium of strong ideas about guilt, racism, recent French history and cinema itself, Michael Haneke’s eighth feature is an unsettling, self-reflective masterpiece. It opens with a lingering, static shot of a bourgeois Parisian home. We watch as a woman leaves through the front door. Strangers stroll along the street. A car passes. Birdsong permeates the soundtrack. So far, so very normal; but what are we looking at – and why? The question is rudely answered when rows of static appear and the image blurs and then begins to fast-forward. It’s an illusion: we are, in fact, watching a video that’s been sent anonymously to the owners of this house, Georges and Anne Laurent (Daniel Auteuil and Juliette Binoche), a wealthy, middle-class couple who are ostensibly paragons of the Parisian intelligentsia. Georges is a French version of Melvyn Bragg and hosts a literary discussion show on TV; Anne works for a high-brow publisher. Once this visual trickery is revealed, we watch as the pair agonise over this sinister intrusion into their ordered lives. Who’s been filming their house and why?
Tickets £3: College Reception on 0161 484 6600.
Contact: Judith P Roberts, Head of Performing Arts, on 0161 484 6726
