Code inconnu: Récit incomplet de divers voyages Code Unknown: Incomplete Tales of Several Journeys Michael Haneke 2000 France / Germany / Romania1st time; DVD The lives of several people cross: an actress, her boyfriend, his brother, an immigrant with whom the brother clashes, an illegal immigrant who is deported back to her home. Terrific: an emotionally intense, thematically dense and cinematically intelligent work, probably Haneke's best, but so teasing and daring, so original and bold that it'll probably go overlooked - even Caché, in all its austerity, seems more accessible. Haneke begins and ends scenes in the middle of situations and sentences, never really letting them unfold to the full, and to make an entire narrative out of such fragmented snippets of information which are so geographically and culturally diverse, is challenging enough, but so fantastic is his hold on aesthetic that the main set-pieces are brilliant to watch, not only as stand-alone pieces of wonderful camera-work, but as a kind of narrative device, or as a way of creating meaning: the camera is like a parasite, or a leech, which latches onto whichever is the most interesting piece of dialogue at the time of recording - it follows one conversation so far then another character will enter the frame and it will follow them. It's more curious and less free than what Altman did, but is exciting to watch and essential in creating a kind of frustrating 'blindness', whereby a cut to another, more relieving angle would seem decidedly out of place, and in which characters are trapped and fail to communicate. The best scenes are the opening, in which the camera tracks an entire boulevard back and forth in real time, observing two characters walking and talking, then leaves one to follow the other, who drops a sandwich wrapper on a beggar and is confronted by a black boy; a conversation in a restaurant between an actress and her friends, and then, in the same restaurant (and take) the black boy and his girlfriend from earlier in the film; an unsettling, unflinchingly shot scene on a train in which two thugs terrorise the actress; and the final few 'scenes', the only time in the film where sound overlaps from one shot to the next, bringing together a few of the principle characters without offering any solution as to what awaits them.
Last edited by Capo de La Cosa Nostra; 01/03/0710:00 PM.
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