One thing about the scenes you mentioned with Majid’s bloody nose and him going toward Georges with the ax. I think, since those were Auteuil’s flashbacks, that it was his guilt manifesting itself through the daydreams. With the bloody nose, I don’t remember it that way. I thought both times it was Auteil picturing Majid coughing up blood…kind of him making the lie he told about Majid real to make himself feel better about the horrible thing he’d done. The same with the ax/rooster scene. He told Majid to do it, but he dreams/pictures it being Majid killing the rooster and walking toward him with the ax. He’s remembering it that way to make comfort himself. Making his lies real.

I dunno, maybe that’s a bad reading. But everything Auteuil does seems to be a denial of the actual truth. Like you mentioned, he’s always leaving little pieces of things out even when he’s making admissions about the past. He can’t come to terms with it and keeps holding things back because it’s the only way he can go on living with what’s happened. Like after Majid cuts his throat, there’s that scene where Auteuil is outside a movie theater. It suggests he might’ve actually watched that shit go down and then hit a movie to try to get it out of his mind.

Crazy shit…we talked about the movie all afternoon as we were out doing stuff.

to me, the central themes involved trust, guilt, and the idea of childhood trauma continuing to play a role in adulthood. you have the childhood snapshots of Georges and his bullying attitude toward this other child–bullying which may stem partly from a general distrust in this other child’s role as it is taken in by the family. later, as the tapes are sent, his deception to his wife is apparent but is somewhat covered up by him expressing that it is more out of protecting her from worry than from admitting his role. you can tell by his overdefensiveness that he is losing his own internal battle to guilt over what happened in his past. then of course his wife begins to distrust him for good reason, even though nothing seriously terrible has happened yet. suddenly everyone is on eggshells over a few pieces of paper and film.

so when it gets to the two kids meeting up in the end, to me it illustrates the cycle again. Majid commits suicide, his son now has to live with that trauma, and so by meeting up with Pierrot by the forces of nature he’s got all the seeds in his psyche now to play out this trauma again.

i like the idea of the director being the tape sender, and that all of this is happening in realtime, and as an audience of voyeurs we are contributing to the sudden dysfunction of a family and the continued cycle of grief and violence by introducing random props into their lives and seeing how they react.