Burnwinter wrote:
"by envying it, you literally get a bad taste in your mouth"
Yes, well, it's typical Haneke to force the audience to assign itself an identity relative to the protagonists? Increases the emotional impact.
In Funny Games he makes the alignment with the killers explicit by breaking the fourth wall, perhaps in Caché the main character's lifestyle is intended to be so alluring that practically all audience members will be locked into the same "aspirational" mode that characterises that character's guilty covering up of the past.
Well that's just the thing, isn't it? He's got a really spectacular ability to merge the two in such a way that the viewer becomes both protag and antag, i.e. the viewer always identifies with the victims, but Haneke gives us a pathway to relate to the killers as well.
That's why I like Caché so much, because its got so much subtlety to it. We both despise and aspire to that bougie family, sympathize with them and hate them, we can relate to them, but we don't want to. That bad taste in your mouth is the combination of resentment and envy mixed with a healthy does of indignation, but its not the protagonists or the antagonists that we really have a problem with, its ourselves and our relation to what's on the screen. One of those directors that inspires that delicate amount of self-loathing required to both love the film and feel awkward and miserable while watching it. Like wanting to go to heaven and knowing you don't deserve it.
Reminds of this last verse from La Honte (Rimbaud):
Comme un chat des Monts-Rocheux ;
D'empuantir toutes sphères !
Qu'à sa mort pourtant, ô mon Dieu !
Que S'élève quelque prière !
