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Code Unknown [2001] [DVD]
 
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Code Unknown [2001] [DVD]

DVD ~ Juliette Binoche
3.8 out of 5 stars See all reviews (13 customer reviews)
RRP: £19.99
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Frequently Bought Together

Code Unknown [2001] [DVD] + Time Of The Wolf [DVD] [2003] + Hidden (cache) [DVD] [2005]
Total RRP: £59.97
Price For All Three: £28.94

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Code Unknown [2001] [DVD]
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Product details

  • Actors: Juliette Binoche, Thierry Neuvic, Josef Bierbichler, Alexandre Hamidi, Maimouna Hélène Diarra
  • Directors: Michael Haneke
  • Format: Anamorphic, PAL, Widescreen, Import
  • Language Arabic, English, French, German, Romanian
  • Subtitles: English
  • Region: Region 2 (This DVD may not be viewable outside Europe. Read more about DVD formats.)
  • Aspect Ratio: 1.78:1
  • Number of discs: 1
  • Classification: 15
  • Studio: Artificial Eye
  • DVD Release Date: 19 Nov 2001
  • Run Time: 112 minutes
  • Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars See all reviews (13 customer reviews)
  • ASIN: B00005NZHT
  • Amazon.co.uk Sales Rank: 3,495 in DVD (See Bestsellers in DVD)

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Reviews

Amazon.co.uk Review
In the prelude to Code Unknown, we watch as a class of deaf children play a very sophisticated game of charades. In response to a blank-faced girl shrinking slowly against a wall, the children guess: is it sadness, isolation, loneliness? We are not told the answer before director Michael Haneke cuts to the extraordinary opening sequence of the film. This nine-minute tracking shot along a busy Parisian boulevard, introduces the film's central characters: Amadou, a first generation French boy of West African descent; Maria, a Romanian illegal immigrant; and Anne (Juliette Binoche), a French actress, trying to make the leap from theatre to film. However, this is the only time we will see these characters together in one place before the film fractures into a series of vignettes, which slowly describe their lives, their cultural isolation and their search for small moments of beauty within this alienation.

Michael Haneke has been credited with reinvigorating and refreshing Austrian cinema with expectation-smashing early films such as Funny Games; if his newest pan-European films are anything to go by, he could be set to do the same for Euro cinema in general. Though Code Unknown is very different from Haneke's Benny's Video or Funny Games, like them this film also implicates and involves the viewer in the guilt of the on-screen characters. Its structure of intricately woven story strands is entirely provocative and stirring--politically, aesthetically and emotionally. It's exactly the type of film you want to watch again and again. As with the players of the opening game of charades, we won't be given any easy answers to questions about our collective guilt in the racism and alienation of an undeniably multicultural, multiethnic Europe. --Tricia Tuttle

Product Description
On a busy Paris boulevard, a youth scornfully tosses a crumpled paper bag into the outstretched hands of a beggar woman. This is the bond which, for an instant, links several very different characters: Anne (Binoche), an actress; her war photographer boyfriend Georges; his farmer father and younger brother Jean, who, contrary to his father s wishes, has no interest in inheriting the farm; Amadou, a music teacher for deaf-mute children, and his family, who originate from Africa; and Maria, a Romanian immigrant. Written and directed by Michael Haneke, one of modern cinema s most distinctive and ambitious directors, Code Unknown is a complex film of powerful emotional force and a fascinating study of the subtle connections and barriers between people, social class, race and the difficulty of communicating in the modern world.

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Customer Reviews

13 Reviews
5 star:
 (6)
4 star:
 (4)
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2 star:
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Average Customer Review
3.8 out of 5 stars (13 customer reviews)
 
 
 
 
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

 
64 of 66 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars Conscience and Consequence, 10 Oct 2001
By A Customer
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!
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9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars Probably one of the more accessible of Haneke's dour, psychological studies., 15 Jan 2008
By Jonathan James Romley (Dublin, Ireland) - See all my reviews
(TOP 50 REVIEWER)   
This review is from: Code Unknown [DVD] [2001] [Region 1] [US Import] [NTSC] (DVD)
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.
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12 of 13 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars Comments on the above, 30 Jan 2006
By A Customer
THe first customer review has been very helpful to me in understanding the film. I found it a very well-acted, thoughtful and entertaining film. My only quibble was the lack of any proper conclusion but after reading the review of the guy above I realise it's up to the viewer to reach their own.
One thing to add is the theatrical nature of the film, I wouldn't have been surprised if it had been adapted from a play since each scene is very tight and the actors tend to stay in the same room. A good film, particularly relevant since the recent Parisian race riots.
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Most Recent Customer Reviews

5.0 out of 5 stars No way through
Haneke has crafted a fragmented masterpiece.He does this to eschew morality
and moralising.A pebble of disaffection is thrown into the pond of modern city
life and he... Read more
Published 1 month ago by technoguy

5.0 out of 5 stars It's easy
If you do not wish to be challenged by films, if you do not wish to think about what you are seeing, if you think that the only point of a film is to entertain, if you think that... Read more
Published 19 months ago by Mr. S. T. Morris

4.0 out of 5 stars Crash For Adults?
Michael Haneke's multitude of mini interlinked storylines about different cultures living in Paris and how communications can be strained is, as with most of his films,... Read more
Published 21 months ago by Mr. F. E. Marioni

2.0 out of 5 stars Random multicultural experiences in Paris
"Code Unknown" seems to have divided reviewers into two camps , those who like it and those who hate it; there doesnt seem to be much in between. Read more
Published 23 months ago by L. Davidson

5.0 out of 5 stars Haneke is a Genius
Michael Haneke is an infuriating director. He bores you on purpose sometimes. This film is episodic and frequently banal - there is a five minute sequence of Juliette Binoche... Read more
Published on 12 May 2007 by William Cohen

5.0 out of 5 stars What we have here is a failure to communicate...
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... Read more
Published on 13 Aug 2005 by Trevor Willsmer

1.0 out of 5 stars Not even Juliette Binoche can rescue this one
Very strange. The tag-line says that this is "fragments of unfinished journeys". A better description would be a plotless mish-mash of unfinished scenes that just about have a... Read more
Published on 20 Jul 2004 by Barton Keyes

4.0 out of 5 stars Astonishing, beautiful, thoughful
This is a beautfiul, thoughtful film, provoking intense emotions, and then stepping back and letting you think, then moving you on again. Read more
Published on 9 Jun 2003

1.0 out of 5 stars Absolute Drivel
I Am a Huge fan of Juliette Binoche and she is currently threatening my passion for Isabelle Huppert,although not if she makes another film like this. Read more
Published on 16 Nov 2001 by Robjblack

5.0 out of 5 stars Superb!
The best Binoche film since Three Colours Blue.I saw this film twice at the cinema and will definately buy the video. Read more
Published on 13 Sep 2001

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