Hidden: The Final Shot

After seeing Hidden at a public screening at the Toronto Film Festival, a sample size of friends and colleagues revealed that about 2/3rds of the people who saw it completely missed the crucial piece of visual information at the end while the other third was still puzzling out what it meant. Based on the much larger sample of emails that have been sent to me in two months since the festival adjourned—and really, thanks to everyone for writing; it's been immensely gratifying just to know that you're out there—it divides up pretty neatly along those lines. So before speculating on the significance of it all, let's fill in the blanks first:

In the final shot, two characters who never shared screen space come together for what appears to be a genial conversation: Autueil and Binoche's son Pierrot and Majid's son. If memory serves, Pierrot exits the school from the left side, curls around a crowd of other classmates, and meets Majid's son in the left part of the frame. Believe it or not, they spend a pretty decent amount of time together. Want visual evidence. Check it out:

Majid's son is the kid facing the camera with his arm outstretched to Pierrot's shoulder.Not to get
all Antonioni on you, but here's a closer look:

Okay, so what does it all mean? At first, I was inclined to take the most literal interpretation possible: That the videotapes and letters were some sort of collaboration between the younger generation. But as I get further from the film, this makes less and less sense to me, because I'm inclined to take Majid's son at his word when he tells Auteuil he knows nothing about the tapes. A wise cinephile friend of mine believes that the meeting says more about the future than the past, and something hopeful at that: That the younger generation can come together and take steps to resolve the traumas of the past. This dovetails nicely with the film's political allegory about the state of French-Algerian relations (though you can probably claim the same for their collaboration on the tapes, with the kids unearthing the sins of the father). In any case, I really don't wish to draw any hard conclusions until I see the film a second time. And there's no doubt I'll be seeing this one multiple times.

(I'm told also to look sharp during the swim meet scene for further clues. To be continued...)

Addendum 12/29: There has been some suggestion that the final shot is itself a videotape. There's certainly evidence to support this claim, the most compelling being that it so neatly bookends the opening shot and that it's photographed from a set distance, which adds an element of voyeuristic surveillance. I'm not sure if I'm convinced—the questions of "who" and "why" get no satisfactory answer here—but I think it's a possibility worth considering.