I was once naive enough, when reviewing a new work by a particularly refractory American director, to praise it as "the most challenging film of the week" It folded in a matter of days. Soon after, an annoyed distributor took me aside: "Don't you know that if you want people to see a film, you must never, ever, use the word 'challenging'?" I was once naive enough, when reviewing a new work by a particularly refractory American director, to praise it as "the most challenging film of the week" It folded in a matter of days. Soon after, an annoyed distributor took me aside: "Don't you know that if you want people to see a film, you must never, ever, use the word 'challenging'?" Even so, I'll risk it and say the same about Code Unknown, the new film by Austrian director Michael Haneke. "Challenging" normally implies an unduly high broccoli content, as they say good for you but indigestible In this case, though, it simply isn't true. Besides, to pretend Code Unknown was merely entertaining would do an injustice to its singularly high-minded director.
So yes, this film is challenging, and uncompromising and perplexing; it's also utterly riveting and driven by the kind of lucid will that most cinema has forgotten.Haneke has an awkward reputation as a moralist who tends to punish his viewers for their prurience or simply for buying into cinema as entertainment. His Benny's Video (1992) was about a family whose moral sense was eroded by their video recorder; Funny Games (1997), under the guise of a sadistic psycho-thriller, was a rebuke to such amusements and their compliant audiences.By these standards, Code Unknown seems like easy going; however, in terms of its rigour (another dangerous word), it's as tough as his others, and much less obviously didactic. Subtitled "Incomplete takes of several journeys", Haneke's first French film offers an open-ended bundle of narrative threads that intermittently intersect but refuse to form a neat whole. Its 40-some segments involve several characters, among them Anne (Juliette Binoche), an actress filming a thriller about a woman imprisoned by her estate agent; her boyfriend Georges (Thierry Neuvic) a war reporter back from Kosovo; Georges' farmer father and disaffected teenage brother; a West African family; and Maria (Luminita Gheorghiu), a middle-aged Romanian woman reluctantly begging on the Paris streets.Haneke has made a similar jigsaw film before, 71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance (1994), in which all his characters converged in a final apocalypse. Code Unknown plays it backwards, beginning with a nine-minute shot in which several fates fan out from a banal random act, the purchase of a croissant.
As a narrative teaser, Code Unknown is no more difficult than the recent backwards thriller Memento; fragmentation apart, Haneke's film is linear and forward-propelled. Here we piece together not a mystery but a picture of the real world the globalisation-age Europe in which different cultures co-exist with difficulty, in which the powerless are subject to both chance and political order, and in which the fate of an African family is obscurely yet inextricably linked with that of a provincial French farmer.In this universe, all positions are relative and all viewpoints partial Anne, played by the film's nominal star, is not really the centre of the world, simply a point through which various narrative lines happen to pass. This could have been another film entirely, had Haneke concentrated on any other character. He might, for example, have looked closer at the little girl screaming in Anne's apartment block; we suspect she has been abused, but never know for sure.
