Written and directed by Michael Haneke. Drug up for reasons unknown; perhaps for Juliette Binoche who leads with Daniel Auteuil or maybe because the precis evoked the early parts of Lost Highway (1997). I did not understand this movie.
Video tapes (how quaint) mysteriously arrive on the doorstep of the middle-class Parisian couple that contain surveillance footage referring to unshared events in the man's childhood. Their son is becoming more troublesome as he undergoes puberty (no other motivation is provided). The police are mostly as disinterested as I was.
The characters are weak stereotypes; Binoche made the most sense as a bewildered wife. Husband Auteuil is mystifying. The couple inhabits a highly-paid literary fantasy land that has surely been eroded by now. Both are so quick to jump to conclusions and stand on their own amour-propre that we rarely get access to anything factual. I guess this is one way for the guilty to respond when challenged (guilt being an obvious theme of the movie) but it is unsatisfying that so many scenes dragged on or replayed earlier scenes with minor variations. I was not engrossed and things did not conclude satisfactorily; it wasn't so much that the plot dangles as the motivations remained opaque or trivial. For instance, why did Maurice Bénichou (Majid) cut his own throat at that plot-convenient time?
The cinematography is harshly digital, of a piece with the video tapes. Most of the movie is dialogue in tell-don't-show mode.
Roger Ebert: four stars at the time and another four stars as a "great movie". A. O. Scott wants it to be deeper than it is. Wikipedia. All claim the mystery of who sent the tapes is answered in the final shot — I was too impatient for it to be over to scan the frame sufficiently but apparently it was the sons wot did it — and if that was the (trite) intention then we needed to see more of the other characters.
