Code Unknown [2001] [DVD]

haneke's masterful look at a modern European city examines exactly what it is like to 'exist' in western society. The multilayered story has many protagonists and follows their lives after they are linked by a single event. Anne (Binoche) is an actress, her boyfriend Georges is a war photographer, his brother Jean has run away from home, their father struggles to manage his farm and keep his emotions supressed. Amidou is a first generation african imigrant, who teaches deaf children music, his father is a taxi driver. Maria, from Romania, has been deported from France for begging but must make the humiliating journey back to provide for her family.
The film is complex, yet simple. It essentially asks wheather we can ever really communicate, wheather we are ever aware of the significance of our actions and most devastatingly wheather we have a duty to help even if we are not asked for help. Do we have a responsibility.
Haneke's film is a technical tour-de-force, with perfectly sublime performances. Binoche has not been better since her days with Kieslowski. Her performance as the dispossessed actress is raw and real. The final scenes devastating in their effectiveness and simplicity.
This is a film that is hard to decipher. It will take numerous viewings, but is certainly worth it. Do yourself a favour and stick with it. Supreme!

Code Unknown was a revelation. The first Michael Haneke film I've seen, I was surprised at how vitriolic the reviews have been here and on the film's IMDB page - arty-fartsy and incomprehensible seems to be the general concensus, yet I found it remarkably vital and accessible for a film revolving around race relations and everyday failures to communicate. Starting with an incident on a French boulevard where misinterpreted actions have consequences for all the wrong people, it proceeds in a series of incomplete scenes by people linked by the incident or their relationships with those involved, taking in a multi-ethnic city where so many people have shut off from those around them that they either fail to understand each others' problems or to even make the effort.

What's particularly interesting is that it plays on the audiences own prejudices and presuppositions - at one point we naturally assume that a young black character is seated away from the window booth he requested in a restaurant because of his color, but no: it's because he turned up 45 minutes late and the place is busy. Similarly, it doesn't presume that people in what are supposed to be empathetic or compassionate professions are inherently good - when Juliette Binoche's actress asks her war photographer boyfriend advice about the sounds of child abuse from a neighboring flat, he doesn't want to know and her anger is more because he won't give her an out but forces the situation back on her. Her solution: ignore it. Even the innocent victim of the opening incident has to admit with shame that she herself had done the same thing to people she looked down on. It's beautifully worked out with several powerful sequences that are uncomfortably familiar to city dwellers (the metro sequence is particularly powerful) and somehow comes across as exhilarating as it is uncomfortable. Great filmmaking - and a nice extras package on the DVD, too.

Code Unknown; Incomplete Tales of Several Journeys (2000) is another of director Michael Haneke's deeply austere and emotionally rigid intellectual probes into the human condition; and the various psychological elements that cause problems, not only in our personal lives and relationships, but in a broader, sociological sense as well. At this point it is perhaps worth noting that the film's essay-like subtitle alludes to the style of the film, which involves a number of long, unbroken shot compositions (some longer than ten minutes) that often end abruptly, with no real sense of resolution.

Presented as a series of loosely connected vignettes that focus on the idea of character interaction as opposed to narrative direction, Code Unknown is a difficult film to appreciate, at least at the level that many of us would probably approach it. One of the main focus points here is the idea of perception; how both we as an audience and the characters in the film perceive the action unfolding from the limited point of view that we've been given. Some good examples of this would include the lengthy and suitably tense scene early on in the story; in which a number of unconnected characters all come together through a seemingly mundane event that ends with a scuffle erupting between a white teenager and a young black man, resulting in both men - and the various onlookers - being arrested. Later, midway through a particularly disconcerting scene, a toddler playing on the balcony of a high-rise apartment slips, all the while watched with horror by his terrified parents who are powerless to do anything. Then finally, towards the end of the film, we watch in eager suspense as a young Arab boy harasses Juliette Binoche's character on a Parisian metro. Throughout the film and these sequences in particular we expect something spectacular and thrilling to happen but it never seems to arrive, until, of course, we realise that 'something' is happening.

As with his most recent film, the highly acclaimed Hidden (2005), there are a number of interesting sequences in Code Unknown, which, on basis of description alone, could easily lead one to believe that they are about to watch a tense, Hollywood thriller. The film obviously couldn't be further removed from this ideal, however, with Haneke once again offering us a dour, colourless psychological study, in which characters crash into one another almost at random and cause a ripple effect that disrupts the order of everything that came before. Clearly, Code Unknown is unconcerned with thrilling the audience, at least, not in the typical sense; with the film never allowing the dramatic tension to build to anything beyond the confines of these various character vignettes that are strung together one by one in order to build up the story. This is a film that wants to enlighten with a raw depiction of everyday life; taking the viewer from moments of deadpan humour (albeit, incredibly low-key humour) to scenes that evoke a feeling of almost crippling desperation. Once again, these techniques are used to mislead the audience into thinking that the film is heading in a different, very "non-Haneke-like" direction, before switching track and confounding us all over again. If you give it some time to really get going, then the results can be oddly thrilling, and - in my opinion - probably more enjoyable and satisfying overall than anything else Haneke has directed.

Still, the film does have that sense of screaming polemic that much of the director's previous work has occasionally descended into; with the loose ends and the experiments in cinematic formalism creating a cold and intellectual exercise that will naturally turn many potential viewers away. A real shame too, because regardless of these distancing intellectual experiments, the direction, photography and acting are superb throughout, and - like The 7th Continent (1994) and Funny Games (1997) - help to weave together a beguilingly tense tapestry of guilt, anger, misery and social despair.