New on Video: ‘Code Unknown’
Code UnknownWritten and directed by Michael Haneke
France/Germany/Romania, 2000
Haneke assigns Code Unknown the subheading of “incomplete tales of several journeys,” an apt accompaniment given the fragmentary nature of the film. Certain scenes stop and start abruptly, many without any sort of establishing shot or concluding narrative signal; the vignettes, in their singular, isolated presentation, do feel occasionally incomplete. But as the stories gradually evolve amidst a montage of spatial and temporal shifts and character (re)introductions, a larger world begins to form. Spanning diverse locations over an indeterminate period, Haneke paints a broad multicultural picture, one that has as its basic grounding a preliminary sequence introducing the primary characters, from there branching off to side stories providing prior and succeeding context.
Juliette Binoche plays Anne Laurent, an actress who one day runs into Jean (Alexandre Hamidi), the younger brother of her war correspondent boyfriend, Georges (Thierry Neuvic). After going their separate ways, Jean callously tosses some trash at Maria (Luminita Gheorghiu), a vagrant sitting on the sidewalk. Amadou (Ona Lu Yenke), a Malian immigrant, sees the offense and confronts the boy. They fight, the police are called, and Anne takes Jean while Maria and Amadou are arrested; she is deported to Romania and he is harassed though subsequently released. From this initiating action, the film follows each of the characters as they deal with the direct and more subtle repercussions of the incident.
When
Anne first encounters Jean, he says he tried to get into her apartment
but the code was changed, and when he tried to call her, all he got was
her answering machine. Like the averting of this intended communication,
Code Unknown is concerned with connections both missed and
made. Haneke charts these people and the way they interact as
perceptively as he covers the places they inhabit. In choosing to film
in long, single takes, with the actors’ movements dictating the
direction of the camera more so than any sort of strictly ornamental
design, he shows a world that vividly comes alive as any given scene
unfolds. As the main characters come and go, interacting with their
surroundings, this uncut stylistic choice allows us to also witness
others around them, and we are invited to consider the stories of these
strangers as well, especially those in the more populated public places
(an original title for the project was, in fact, “Strangers”). There are
often those who, though on the periphery of the primary narrative,
nevertheless make an impression. Some are up to no good, others want to
do the right thing; one scene with Anne on the metro shows both facing
off. As the full significance of those to whom we are introduced is not
necessarily clear at first—their back-story, motivations, and
personality traits only developing as the film continues—we find
ourselves uncertainly drawing conclusions of character. Much like those
in the film, we identify features and inferences based on our own
assumptions and even prejudices. Anne’s occupation as an actress is a
symbolically revealing one, giving the implied suggestion that she, like
everyone else, is essentially playing a part in a larger drama. Think
of Shakespeare’s As You Like It: “All the world’s a stage, And
all the men and women merely players; They have their exits and their
entrances, And one man in his time plays many parts, His acts being
seven ages.” The parts here, and their respective scenes, range from the
dramatic (Anne hearing apparent child abuse) to the banal (she does so
while ironing), the two often mingling as in life.
With its expansive structure, Code Unknown
looks at the respective issues of both adults and children, and in its
surveying fragments, we see lives marked by moments of minutia and
downtime and moments of great anxiety, from plowing a field to attending
a funeral, and everything in-between. There are those who live lives of
relative comfort versus those who live lives of hardship and struggle.
In this film that brings together multiple points of view concerning
Europe’s immigrant culture, Haneke, who was himself making his first
feature outside his native Austria, is also examining the impact of
diversity, in terms of cultural, economical, and generational collision.
In classic Haneke style, it’s not always a pleasant merger, but it is
chaotically realistic (though he does call the film his “mildest”). And
as per his norm, Code Unknown achieves its emotional potency
due to a steadfast simplicity, a direct presentation of behavior with
all its blemishes. As much as his camera may give the spectator the
impression of observational objectivity, however, several of the
characters find themselves in conflict over whether or not they should
get involved in the problems of others; should they stand up for one who
has been wronged and defend the innocent, or should they sit back and
disengage from the troubling world? The “code,” then, could also be the
unclear rules that govern a society, the shared conventions that
influence and guide behavior. Jean may have been disrespectful, but
should his actions be necessarily countered by violence? That’s not the
answer either. So what is? As the title of the film suggests, that code
is unknown.
This
type of multi-character, multi-leveled narrative is a somewhat familiar
construct, but one with endless variations. And under Haneke’s
continually clever direction, the result is one of the most formally
audacious and ambiguous attempts at such a character-driven mosaic. As
with Funny Games three years prior, Code Unknown was nominated for the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival. Though it would lose out to Lars von Trier’s Dancer in the Dark,
it ultimately came away with a special Prize of the Ecumenical Jury and
further established Haneke as a major figure in the world of
international cinema.
No comments:
Post a Comment