Code inconnu

"Code Inconnu" is an utterly original, even revolutionary piece from the Austrian director who continually refuses to compromise and pander to an audience.

Many of the reviews on this site focus on the coherence of the film and suggest that the film lacks meaning or narrative, or even that the film is a failure because it is not easily comprehended. This is untrue and deeply unfair.

"Code Inconnu" is not an immediate film. Indeed it may take several viewings to really come to grips with the meaning of the film - certainly there is not a single definitive meaning. For many film viewers when the basic linear narrative is remote. Again this adds to the view that the meaning of this obscured film is pointless. However this is more a reflection of the viewer and of audience expectation than of this film.

In a series of free standing vignettes Haneke has fashioned a moral conundrum without an answer. Much like in life itself. But rather than searching for meaning or answers Haneke is daring us to confront the questions themselves. The themes here are obviously about racism and reality, but also conscience and the consequence of our actions. By linking his separate characters initially Haneke points out that we are tenuously linked to people by uncontrollable events. By setting his film in Parisian streets, Hanekes film becomes recognizable of all our lives.

The central performance from Binoche is equally ambiguous, again this adds to the strength of the piece, but also the difficulty inherent in it.

The best way to view this film is as a series of questions which have no easy answer. The code is indeed unknown. By viewing each episode as a single moral conundrum the film takes on a very interesting and worthwhile dimension.

Well, I suppose not - but he IS the most exciting and interesting new filmmaker around. I would say "young filmmaker" - only he's not young; judging from his bio he's around 60. And he's not really "new", either - he's already made five films. But his films FEEL shockingly "new" - the MATERIAL is new; and it's some measure of how glacial the pace of real aesthetic change is in this supposedly-globalized world that he is only now becoming known in the U.S.

Those of you who have seen his best-known work, "Funny Games", would probably agree with me that it is the most horrifying movie ever made. "Games" coolly subverts the conventions of the horror movie to unremittingly punish the audience for its desire for violence. The effect is unbelievably harrowing.

Now we have "Code Unknown", which is not nearly as cruel an experience as "Funny Games", but which has the same strict intellectual armature. With as radical a technique as Godard's, Haneke takes a short scuffle in the streets of Paris as the point of departure for a meditation on true knowledge in a world of chance and mischance.

Haneke breaks the film up into short, disconnected fragments, with black spaces between them. In several no words are spoken, while others turn out to be "inside" films that the "lead" character, an actress played by Juliette Binoche, is making. Many are long, single shots - sometimes gliding along to follow the characters, but sometimes rooted in one spot as the characters drift to and fro. And the "stories", such as they are, wander too, from Paris to what looks like the Balkans, as Haneke follows Binoche, her war photographer boyfriend, his brother and father, a street beggar who is deported from Paris, a young black teacher of the deaf, and a host of other ancillary characters. What they don't understand - but we do - is that the course of their lives has been largely determined by encounters with people they'll never even know.

These people may think they're drowning in "too much information" - but actually, they don't have ENOUGH information; Haneke's recurring theme is our attempt to interpret a largely-unknown reality - and the problem of our responsibility to act on that interpretation. And despite a handful of longeurs, the effect is mostly completely absorbing. Those who were fascinated by the backwards-moving "Memento" will have a field day with "Code Unknown", where we have to tease out relationships, back story, and whether or not the narrative we're watching is "really" happening at all, with a lot fewer clues than Guy Pierce ever got.

And THEN - and this is what's interesting - somehow Haneke demands that we "make up our minds" about what we've seen; we feel compelled to judge, and yet we cannot - is the kid we see mistreating a beggar really a bad kid? Is the actress really being sealed up to die in a windowless room? Was the note from "a defenseless child" really written by an abused little girl (she turns up dead, so with a shock we appreciate what's at stake in our pause to consider the issue)? "Code Unknown" offers no answers - but then neither does life. The film ends with a scarily-happy drum-pounding by a chorus of deaf children.

I suppose what's startling about Haneke is that he has such an assured technique and yet eschews almost all directoral razzle-dazzle. He's not a Darren Aronofsky, ringing a dozen eye-popping changes on an essentially-empty story. And his intense horrors are justified by the depth and purity of his concerns - unlike those of, say, Tarentino or (God help us!) Guy Ritchie. Haneke's smarts are story and conceptual smarts, not adolescent film smarts; he's wildly daring, but he's icily mature. I'd almost say he's the heir to Kubrick's mantle, but these days that might be tarring him with an unwanted brush (as I watched "Code Unknown" I suddenly realized I was glad Pauline Kael was dead - she'd feel driven to sabotage this much intellectual challenge!).

I had to see "Code Unknown" at the Museum of Fine Arts here in Boston - however, there was a substantial crowd there; word is slowly getting out about Haneke. "Funny Games" is available on video (but be warned!); as far as I know, his latest, "The Pianist" (with Isabelle Huppert - Haneke's career is obviously being helped by interest from European-mainstream actresses) has yet to achieve a U.S. release. Here's hoping we'll see it in the States sometime soon.

"Unknown Code: Incomplete Tales of Several Journeys (Code inconnu: Récit incomplet de divers voyages)" is a fascinating exploration of communication, using all the elements of film to create a trompe l'oeil of sight, sound and character interactions.

We see extended vignettes of people tangentially related through an accidental intersection in Paris. In a brief interview on the Sundance Channel, where I viewed the film, writer/director Michael Haneke said he specifically selected Paris because it is one of the few European cities whose multiculturalism is so visible. We see here how it attracts immigrants not only as traditionally from the rural countryside, but now from Eastern Europe and Africa.

Though not as violent as the incidents in "Amores perros", released the same year, or the later "Crash," the unsettling confrontation influences the characters' perceptions, of each other and of authority figures. We see them made sensitive to how people look, how people talk to each other, the sounds they make, and, even more importantly, shades how they interact. We see how differently people communicate with their own families, with their friends, their parents, their children, their colleagues, their lovers or their advisers, particularly through simple life cycle events.

Sometimes Michael Haneke toys with us, as the camera moves back and reveals that a poignant situation isn't as dire as we thought, particularly playing on the terrific Juliette Binoche's well-known image as a beautiful actress (and yes, she does look beautiful even standing around in lingerie ironing while watching TV). Or he plays ironic tricks – having deaf kids do emotional charades or perform in a marching drum band or creating ambiguity about a door entry code to reinforce a theme of restless homelessness. We see lovers who communicate passionately without words, in one lovely scene even without touching. (I wonder if this scene with these two inspired a related scene in Rodrigo García's recent "Nine Lives.")

One key character is a self-righteous photojournalist (really stereotypically portrayed by bearded, hunky, disheveled Thierry Neuvic in a multi-pocketed vest with an ever-present camera around his neck) documenting ethnic cleansing in Kosovo or taking candid portraits of unaware subway passengers. But he is helpless at assisting his rebellious teen brother or sullen farmer father or estranged young son. Issues of responsibility to neighbors and passersby is viscerally shown to be not the extreme goal of stopping genocide, but rather providing dignity to a fellow human being or simply listening to what's happening next door and acting on it.

Haneke provides sympathetic insight into the inner lives of African immigrants, with an ear to how happenings look different to Western rationalists than to those used to revelations of divine and interpretive meanings, particularly in dreams, or sense of time.

But while he is very sympathetic to the pushes and pulls of immigration that change people's place in society from matriarch to "the gypsy" as the universal "other" who everyone higher up in society puts down, the family scenes in the Romanian village are more stereotyped, with ethnic wedding dancing.

Haneke's disarmingly passive style, with almost no music or cinematic affectations (he even mocks his Dogme-style use of sound by showing actors in the film-within-a-film re-dubbing dialog lost to a passing airplane) does make us feel like voyeurs, with each vignette constructed in a single take. In the filmed interview he said the key opening scene took 32 takes before he was satisfied.

Many different characters are presented in uncompleted stories without any connection. Some years ago, Michael Haneke surprised the lovers of cinema with his masterpiece of violence, the impressive `Funny Games'. Now he surprised me again, in a negative way: although having a good cast leaded by the wonderful Juliette Binoche, and very long scenes without any cut, the screenplay of `Code Unknown' is a great deception. Each story spins without reaching any point. There is free aggression in the subway, lack of communication, poverty and other uninteresting subjects and after almost two hours of film, I asked myself: `What is the point?' In Brazil, we have a saying, which in English could be translated by `of people with good-intention, the hell is crowded'. The intentions of Michael Haneke probably were the best possible, however his movie is terrible. My vote is six.

Title (Brazil): `Código Desconhecido' (`Unknown Code')

I tracked this one down after being impressed with Haneke's "Funny Games," and while the two films could not be farther apart in intent, both reveal a competent filmmaker of enigmatic yet fascinating films. It seems in the three years between the two films, Haneke has replaced his antagonistic/didactic antics in favor of a more personal, contemplative study of how simple actions in today's diverse culture can have far-reaching effects. "Code Unknown" is as involving visually as it is cerebrally. Apart from a few montages (comprised of photos taken by one of the film's many peripheral characters), almost every scene is composed in one long, carefully orchestrated shot. Without the distractive tendencies of editing, the viewer is promptly absorbed into each vignette, each of which is loosely related to the others by the film's first scenario. Throughout the film, complex social issues such as xenophobia, vagrancy, and familial strife are explored; however the film's effectiveness lies in its ability to portray the sense of homelessness often described as an inevitability of today's consumerist, globalist culture. Which is not to say that the film succeeds indefinitely in its grand scope. At times, the scenes seem either pointless, or pointlessly drawn out. It occasionally seems Haneke is overreaching in breadth: framing the film with deaf children signing seems somewhat pretentious, but can be forgiven when the rest of the film's minimalist formality is taken into consideration. However, an interesting analysis of the semiotics of "Code Unknown" could probably be thought out (the two meta-films, the deaf kids, the title), but that would require more than one viewing, and more tenacity than I'm sure most viewers are willing to give. Still, quite a visually stunning and at times intense film, slightly marred only by the same quality that makes it worthwhile: its refusal to adhere to accepted filmic logic.