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17 of 20 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Brilliant Art-House Cinema, 20 May 2007
In the multimedia world, most of the information we absorb is simple and designed to grab your attention. Political ideas are reduced to simple messages for mass consumption. I'm interested in contemporary city life, especially its diversity and complexity.
I lived for nine years in central London. I moved out three years ago, and I've found it difficult to express what an overwhelming and difficult experience it was. Then I saw Michael Haneke's Hidden - the story of a well-to-do professional family in Paris, which is drawn into contact with an immigrant family on the other side of the tracks. The encounter shows the weaknesses in urban family life, the pressures, the loneliness, the difficulty of communicating, the animosity and impatience when confronted to people who don't share your values.
Haneke creates mood by focusing the camera on buildings for long periods. He films very banal events, which are affecting because they are familiar to you. In Code Unknown, we watch Binoche ironing a T-shirt for nearly five minutes. But during that scene she hears a child being hit by a parent in a neighbouring flat. I remember a similar experience. My flatmate, who I disliked, was being beaten by her boyfriend. I didn't know what to do. She didn't like me, either. It was a big turning point in my life, because I realised there are brutal things in life going on, but what am I supposed to do?
The subject matter of the Piano Teacher is at times, repulsive: perversion, disturbing fantasy, a highly dysfunctional relationship between mother and daughter. Who would want to pay good money to see this? But it is not a self-indulgent wallowing in horrible things. It does say something very plausible about the way human relationships go.
Time of the Wolf is an apocalyptic film. It shows human beings deprived of their dignity in a desperate situation. Of the four films, it's the hardest, but it helps to define how Haneke works as a film-maker.
Code Unknown has some really dull scenes: a tractor plouging a field, a man giving a motorbike to his son, a ride in a car through a Rumanian village. But there is one ten-minute scene, when the Juliette Binoche character gets some abuse from an Arab boy on the Metro. It gives you a feel of how vulnerable you are on the tube. Nobody springs to her defence at the beginning. She moves. He follows. Then he spits in her ear. Another Arab man goes to kick him, and you expect a fight to break out. The boy stays on the train, and you think the altercation is over. Then he gets off, turns and shouts into the carriage, making everyone jump with shock.
This short scene says many things about what it's like to live in an international city: the hostility, the kindness, the chaos, the fear, the vulnerability.
Code Unknown ends by following the Binoche character as she comes out of the Metro station and goes into her flat. What's that all about? Well, if you've lived in London, Paris or New York, it says how lonely and hard urban life is. How many things you have to deal with, how fragile your relationships are. How difficult it is to express and fulfill your desires and wishes.
Pretentious, yes, difficult, yes, boring, a bit, commercial, hardly, critically successful, not really, but somehow Haneke says things on film that you can't put into words.
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6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
the killer quartet, 23 July 2008
4 great movies in one case with extras including intrviews ,award functions and featurettes -unmissable
1.code unknown-haneke always works in triads or so i perceive,here we are introduced directly to the concept of communication or the rather lack of it in the form of a class of deaf -mute kids trying to reach out to each other,but then it assumes a dramatic parody in an intelligent mode on the contemporary european culture of melting pots ,what we see are real people like us -familiar themes though ugly and unwanted but happenning in our midst,juxtaposed on media images from kosovo and kabul.this then becomes both a mockery of human values as they are in their unjust,poetic licence as well as a satire on race and behaviour.
the central scene is played as hamidi-a french white youth tosses waste paper into the lap of a romanian beggar, amadou-a muslim youth from mali[an african music teacher]chides and confronts him-with binoche intervening to stop the fight ,the travesty ensues as law arrives and arrests the beggar woman and the african moralist who wants hamidi to apologise to the beggar woman .
this then gives mr.haneke a solid reason to divulge into the lives of the chic actress ,the muslim black youth and the romanian woman .
we see the cesspool modern europe has become with broken human rights strewn all over where victims become agressors and perpetrators win in public .
neuvic is binoch's boyfriend ,their real -life argument in a super-market is a delight to watch ,binoche being harassed on the metro by a disgruntled white hating arab boy is horrific with no one but a middle aged arab man intervening ,
neuvic covering his story in kosovo and kabul become more expansive to take us into the conflict zones of human massacres.
but the victory belongs to haneke as he brings about the amalgamation of multiple cultures ,behaviours and prejudices in a moral story which explores whether justice is still an honorourable code in our social milieu .
unfortunately for all of us except the totally naive the answer is unkown as mentioned in the title.
the music with the martial drumming ,the walk on boulevard st.germain and the metro ride are captured by the camera in the most creatively captivating manner possible and the tale of mis-communication and social bigotry in today's tenchnically enlightened and human right concious society becomes a masterwork on present day human behaviour in everyday life .
a code you all need to explore to divulge into your own truth -haneke is indeed a wise man or even a genius .
2.TIME OF WOLF
The lush greens of the luscious french rural landscape are poised with the bonfires of the survivors who have escaped an apocalaypse which might represent our pointless existence and still it brings optimism to the human dregs gathered in a train station awaiting supplies and administering a rough order in the manner of the true law of the jungle.
The initial murder of an innocent man that is never brought to justice as a word of mouth accusation is just as critical of the present mass murders prevalent globally .
The dependants are still shown as compassionate and caring who are humane as the widow[Huppert]who is protecting the son and daughter in a arhetype matriarchal role.
The daughter is writing letters to her murdered father and seeking an ally in a forlorn boy who is a loner and the rebel who lives as an outcast as a self defense shunning the rest of this community .
The rulers are the gunmen as anyone who has a weapon is right whether moral or unjust ,as they wield the law in it's exigent frail disastrous social failure by being the custodians .
The young son is a soul who is tortured and will want to offer himself as a pagan sacrifice to bring world back to order.
The cinema is shot outdoors in fascinating forest land with trees almost coming to life and becoming characters as is nature itself shown in it's most potent self.
The only music is Beethovens sonata played in one sequence and it becomes a sign with the rest of the movie filled with crackling fires and horses neighing with the sounds of the forest .
The food and water are scarce ,yet it rains in a bleak moment and this is a reprisal as are the livestock which sustain the remnants .
The awaited train which runs in the finale is the solitary hope in a metaphor for our troubled human civilization ,albeit haneke discusses racial ,religious and political mythology in the context of a polack family amongst the survivors who are blamed as a scapegoat ,but the fact there is a rough order that evolves in the mayhem and a desperate compassion which is demonstrated by the majority of the protagonists witness the revival of human spirit.
The character of the child benny[THE SON ]is fascinating as he is representing the symbol of self-sacrifice that will redeem humanity of it's sins and his unnecessary but resilient defiance is a symbol of humanity in all it's glory.
The fact haneke does not draw into discussing the root cause of this biological disaster is genius as it is the consequences and the human behaviour elicited by the event that is crucial ,and the finale absolves humanity and haneke himself of his critics who accuse him of pessimistic delusions .
the movie is altruistic rather than nihilistic and it evolves from it's dark epilogue to the surreal finale in a fascinating mixture of subplots and characters ,here nature is the main player in control of humanity ,whether we are talking of a biological war or global warming is insignificant ,the philosophy here is how might the survivors prepare to survive that event whether this represents our present milieu itself ,which makes it a greater truth and satire on the current political situation itself .
the movie is a warning to the smug reality of the current urban western culture as to how fragile it is in it's complex but unjust framework .This is an observation ,it is neither sentimental nor a sermon as it does not judge but simply see the natural progression of events as they unfold with each character performing in accords to their conscience ,and leaves the audience to infer the conclusion.
Great work from a genius .
3.PIANO TEACHER
life is a natural gift and art is an imitation of life ,it is at best a humanist communication of that imitation to be perceived as an imitation of nature ,as far as music is concerned it is natural as the two are not to be confused with art itself ,music and schubert are presented in the dual persona of the teacher who is coldly intellectual and a perverse voyeur in private ,the right of privacy is inviolable and as such an artist has the right to perceive out of the private life of his character,in this case a sexually repressed woman who is a musical genius ,she fantasises about sex in a pornographic milieu ,this is a satire on sadomasochism as a direct consequence of being borne out of pornographic celebration of perversion.
The movie is great not because the performances of Huppert as the paradoxically real woman intellectual being pursued obsessively by a charming student infatuated by her talent as Majimel are outstanding but rather because of the distinction it makes between the fact that nature ceases to be reality as soon as it is rendered into an art media .
the moment you indulge in an artistic maneouvre you enter a different domain ,a replication of life itself while that can be glorious but it can never be the same .
nature and life never change but art does ,as it is a human perception .
This is the primary reason why piano teacher is great because it observes the auto- biography of an austrian author through the cerebral lens of cinema without taking sides between the 2 main characters who are indulging themselves in a controlled manner to their weird passions ,the evolution of majimel from an infatuated youth to a violent rapist is natural as he is a natural animal under his cloak of civility and the woman provkes and awakes that natural beast.
the consequences are shown without any graphic sex in a very cold manner devoid of sexual gratification ,
the man fully aware of his action informs the woman not to report the event,yet he appears totally non-chalant in the next sequence in a public pretense as if nothing transpired ,the woman thus mutilates herself and leaves the music hall,inferred as perceived ,is she dead or is she gone to a porn shop to gratify herself ,
the conundrum has been left by the artist for the audience to conclude as haneke is too wise to judge or conclude for his audience ,and that is what makes his cinema great art as he observes life without trying to make a stylish circus out of it which must tie all the ends in the way mediocre artists fulfill their perfectionist styles ,as perfection is unattainable in art ,it only exists in nature itself and art is only a perception or imitation of nature .
great cinema indeed by any definition -art or stylish reality ,it is left for us to decide
4.CACHE-HIDDEN
papon ,a nazi collaborator ordered the massacre of at least 200-1000 peaceful demonstrators during the algerian war,drowned or shot in the heart of paris.
this movie is a socio-political hidden innuendo in the form of a refined and re-invented revisitation of the event and its reverbrating consequences,its victims are actually the guilt-ridden french conscience that tolerated a state sponsored concentration camp and brutal police killings intentionally,the satire or observation works in the form of a modern couple who are receiving violent messages ,the reaction of the spouses to each other is natural as the wife rebels...
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5.0 out of 5 stars
fabulous films, 7 Jan 2010
Hi bought these as a gift - recipient loved the White Ribbon by the same director and thoroughly enjoyed all of these
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