The central character in Michael Haneke's movie Hidden is a culture critic who takes a risk with reputation. The gamble of Georges, a French arts journalist and broadcaster, is personal rather than professional. But the chance I am taking today is purely work-related: it's my contention that Hidden is one of the first great movies of the 21st century.
I am not persuaded of this simply because the protagonist does the same job as I do. The profession of Georges (Daniel Auteuil) is largely a premise for the driving metaphor of Haneke's film, which is that someone whose job is to be watched - Georges is host of a literary discussion programme on French TV - finds himself almost being destroyed by a watcher (who may or may not also be a viewer).
But the importance of this movie is not that it involves the media. There is nothing narrow about the appeal of this piece. The 63-year-old Austrian-born director - previously known for cult successes such as Funny Games (1997), Code Unknown (2000) and The Piano Teacher (2001) - has here made his most mainstream film. Broadcasting, for Haneke, is merely what Hitchcock (who I believe would have loved to have made Hidden) called the McGuffin, the engine for the tension. The film's brilliance is that it is a sweat-inducing thriller that draws on two of the biggest political issues of the time: the surveillance society and national political guilt.
Hidden begins, in every sense, quietly. There is no soundtrack and nothing happens as we watch a sustained, static wide-shot of a pleasant residential street, which, as Haneke has most recently favoured French language and locations for his films, we suspect to be in Paris. Part of the grammar of cinema is that sustained inaction encourages the expectation of a sudden and terrible event, but Haneke initially cheats on this deal. The first action is electronic rather than human, as the image fizz-wipes backwards: a videotape is being rewound.
Now, inside the house of Georges, we discover that the cassette is a two-hour movie of the outside of his house: the latest in a series of these unnervingly literal examples of home-movies to have been pushed through his letterbox. We immediately guess that, while Georges seems to have an utterly enviable life - the living-room is expensively appointed and he's married to Juliette Binoche - Haneke is showing us that there is some kind of gap between his private and public success.
When it becomes clear that Georges's job is to be seen on videotape - his book-chat programme is a version of Bernard Pivot's celebrated highbrow series Apostrophes - the inevitable temptation is to suspect a viewer. Particularly, perhaps, as he hosts an arts show. Are the videotapes a sarcastic suggestion that the discussions he fronts are as interesting as watching dried paint on a front door? Another obvious initial possibility is that Georges has become involved with a woman who is dementedly recording the marital home that she has failed to break. And these days, we inevitably think of terrorism or of surveillance by some secret organisation, presumably with the initials VHS.
An inevitable handicap of writing about a suspense movie (of which, among other things, Hidden is a top-class example) is that the plot has to be protected like a president. It is probably safe only to say that the focus of the stalker-cassettes switches to two other houses (a shabby flat and a rural farmhouse) and that Georges guesses long before us whose finger is on the record button.
There's much less risk in a theme-spoiler: Hidden turns on lies and guilt, individual and collective. One possible reading of the film is that every line of dialogue spoken by every character except one - whether in marital conversations or workplace meetings - is a lie and that the only person who consistently tells the truth is one whose life was destroyed by mendacity. But, even if the script is not as schematic as that, every plot twist in Hidden involves a fib, large or small.
For reasons you don't need a PhD in international studies to appreciate, veracity and conscience have recently become the buzz-topics of western entertainment. (The hit Broadway play of the season, John Patrick Shanley's Doubt, in which a man's life may have been destroyed by a lie, is thematically very similar to Hidden.) On the surface, the political guilt in Hidden is specific to French military history - which can also be seen as a disguised way of tackling the Nazi guilt of Haneke's native Austria - but, from the film's first screening at the Cannes film festival last year, reviewers have drawn parallels with Iraq.
The director, at a festival press conference, was extremely wary of being attached to the anti-war ticket, because the governing mood of the movie is ambiguity and his film is much more than Michael Moore's. Even so, it is quite reasonable to read the film as a parable of political duplicity and it is equally fair to see post-9/11 paranoia (the vulnerability of everyday domestic life) or the CCTV culture in which, without ever having the evidence posted to our homes as Georges does, each of us is taped numerous times a day in our cities, images that will only come to light if we should become a victim or a perpetrator of murder. But, as with all great films, the most resonant messages are visual.
Haneke has always been interested in video - his 1992 film Benny's Video explores the effect of his VHS collection on a child - and Hidden brilliantly exploits the flat, cold, inherently slightly sinister quality of high-definition video. This format works especially well for films (The Constant Gardener is another) in which the characters are permanently uncertain about whether they are being watched.
One of the tricks of Hidden is that most of its images must not look or feel professionally directed. (In this respect, it's the cinematic antithesis of Peter Jackson's King Kong, which yells at us in every sequence that there's a guy with a cheque-book and a megaphone behind the scenes.) The effect of a plot that involves secretly made tapes is that every fresh set-up asks the tense question: who is directing this? At various times we are watching Haneke's movie, the stalker's tapes and Georges's programme. During the film, it also becomes possible that more than one person is involved in recording and sending the threatening cassettes.
For long stretches, Haneke so cleverly accustoms us to the idea that tension derives from nothing happening (the videos sent to Georges are like hate mail on blank sheets of paper) that, when a character finally makes an unexpected sudden movement, it becomes one of the most shocking moments of violence in cinema. Hidden is so dense with mysteries that an important revelation is kept back until the credits sequence and has the effect of making you want immediately to see the movie again.
In his otherwise reticent Cannes press conference, the director mentioned that "you see something happen" during the cinema-emptying frames. These consist of a long wide shot of the steps of a school at home-time as we watch a large group of students, occasionally greeting each other or someone collecting them. This is Haneke's final test of our eyes and the last of the film's commentaries on the reliability of perception. After the screening in Cannes, this sequence proved to be a sort of Rorschach montage in which viewers saw what they expected or wished to see. Different observers believed that they had detected evidence of a death, a divorce or a dispute over paternity. A critic who is a conspiracy theorist saw a clue to the involvement of the French secret service.
Last weekend, in the Sunday New York Times' annual feature in which its reviewers reveal what they believe the Oscar nominations should be, two out of the three critics chose Hidden and Haneke for best picture and director, a very unusual level of praise for a foreign-language film. Those admirers are, of course, also critics and it is possible that the journalistic response to Hidden ever since last year's Cannes simply reflects the generosity of response that a documentary about pigeons would get from the Fancier Gazette. I don't think so, though. Evelyn Waugh's Fleet Street novel Scoop is the favourite book of most journalists but it also happens to be a lasting masterpiece.
· Hidden is out on January 27
