Every year around this time I take a few days off to go to the movies and see as many films as I can. Yesterday was the best day of those I took off. I saw Michael Haneke's psychological thriller, Cache (Hidden) in the morning and Woody Allen's Match Point in the evening.

It was somehow approporiate that I chose to watch these two in one day. Both might be put in the thriller genre. But after seeing Cache, and finding myself with all the anxious fans at the New York opening of Match Point I was having some pretty high expectations. I would have felt much better if I had seen these movies in reverse order, because Cache really brings the goods where Match Point fails to completely satisfy.

The stories

Cache was perhaps the most eerie and thrilling movie I've seen in a long time. The story strings along and feeds us miniscule bits of a puzzle to keep us engaged until we're ready to burst. Its resolution is sudden, and the relief of knowing how things end is as subtle as suddenly exploding a balloon in a room full of sleeping babies. But even with that clean resolving moment, he still takes the time to screw with our heads a little more. I can imagine the pleasure it must give someone to twist audiences' emotions with stories like these and hear the gasps and sighs at screenings. I would just love it if it were me who was the screenwriter or director. Brilliant, brilliant film. I won't say much more because I don't want to give away anything about techniques or plot.

Match Point, on the other hand, was a bit of a disappointment. Sure, it was an entertaining movie, but trading New York's Upper East Side for London's analog of well-appointed flats and the mansions of its well-to-do didn't do much for me. At one point I began to wonder what the difference was and, being who I am (not a member of the Upper East Side gentry) I found myself wondering why the hell I was supposed to find the life of bored privileged folks so interesting. But the story really isn't about the privileged folks as much as it is about the poorer chaps making it into their salons, be it Woody in Allen's past films or Chris in this film, an Irish tennis player who makes his way up in the world from a poor past. The story about Chris' change of luck, the thread in this yarn, makes for an interesting story telling device. He's a tennis pro who's good, but can't really make it. Somehow his luck changes and we see how things get better and better for him. Toward the end, we wonder if his luck can go on despite his blundering attempts to control his fate, and if he can get away with it all. It's clever and fun to watch. But it's not really much of a different story for Allen.

Comparing the experiences

While Match Point was entertaining, Cache felt ground breaking. Watch these two in succession and you immediately feel the difference in story telling. Both have aspects of a thriller. Allen's focusses more on the external aspects of Chris' life -- getting us comfortable with his rise and establishment with a certain way of life. Cache focusses on getting us inside the terrorized mind of Georges. This is how these two films differ completely. In Allen an externalized experience of Chris we are to watch passively, roaming from room to room and being force-fed the story. Hanecke gives us just enough insight into Georges mind to get our minds ticking and to build just enough anxiety in us that we want the story to move faster. But he is measured in his distribution of it.

Somehow I compared the pacing and technique that Hanecke and Allen use of stringing us along and keeping us anxious before the moment of resolution to the experience watching Ang Lee's Sense and Sensibility. Hanecke and Lee do it much more effectively than Allen. If you've seen Sense and Sensibility, you might remember that moment of relief when Emma Thompson starts crying at the moment that Hugh Grant's character admits to having held his affection for her. It's a release built up by the trick of leading us on and wanting. In thrillers, the trick is giving us enough rope to hang ourselves with -- to keep us wanting a resolution so we don't crawl out of our skin with anticipation.

Another element of Cache that is done right is it's use of still and seemingly uneventful long shots. What's missing in much of American movie making is the act of NOT doing so much with every bit of film, but utilizing quiet, still moments like this. I'm talking about what graphic designers call white space. Professional speakers also utilize a similar tool by using dramatic pauses for effect. Ang Lee gets it, and Brokeback Mountain uses this white space a lot. Indie film makers use it a lot. Hanecke got it perfectly in Cache. The effectiveness of stopping the action of a scene and letting it keep going in the viewers mind is incredibly effective story telling. It allows an intensity of experience that cannot be spoken. But while so many films insult us by telling us what we're supposed to feel or doing the same with music, thrillers have a knack for doing so by doing very little. The Blair Witch Project is an example of this. In the case of Cache it allows us to imagine ourselves experience psychological terror vicariously without doing very much stating of the obvious.