Movies like Code Unknown make me feel like the big, dumb, undereducated, beer-swilling, knuckledragging shambling mound than I am and so desperately try to hide from the rest of the world. This French-language film is fiercely intellectual and thoughtful and has things to say about things, by gum. And that WHOOOOSH sound you hear is most of them sailing over my pointy head.
Actually, Austrian writer-director Michael Haneke (best known for the 2001 Cannes Grand Prix winner The Piano Teacher and the wickedly messed-up Funny Games) injects a serious amount of deliberate vagueness into this unravelling ball of vignette strings, following the lives of five Parisians whose daily existences intersect during one random encounter on a boulevard. It plays tonight through Monday at the Metro Cinema in the Citadel's Zeidler Hall.
Juliette Binoche, who turned us off cocoa-based confections for the foreseeable future in the sickly sweet Chocolat, more than redeems herself here as Anne, a semi-successful actress whose remote boyfriend Georges (Thierry Neuvic) is often out of town photographing war atrocities in places like Kosovo.
The film begins with a mind-blowingly complex nine-minute unbroken shot on a Parisian street where Anne meets Jean (Alexandre Hamidi), Georges' ne'er-do-well little brother. Jean has taken off from the farm where he lives with his father, rejecting the old man's wishes that one of his sons take over the operation.
When Jean callously tosses some trash into the lap of a beggar woman, Amadou, a black teacher of deaf-mute students, confronts him and demands he apologize to the lady. The Paris police get involved, with their offhandedly racist attitudes worn on their sleeves, and Amadou (Ona Lu Yenke) and the Romanian beggar Maria (Luminita Gheorghiu) are carted off, while Jean is free to go.
From then on, Haneke drops in on each of these characters in turn, detachedly viewing small moments of their lives as they spread out like ripples on a pond from the spot where a pebble has been dropped.
Almost all the scenes are shot with a single camera in one unbroken take, and many are simultaneously fraught with emotion while seeming curiously distant. There are no simple "messages" and sometimes no resolutions, but the entire process is curiously engrossing and watchable.
It's also draws on multilayered aspects of human psychology and influences from French art-house cinema from decades gone by, or so I'm told. None of which a cubehead like me is even remotely able to grasp. If you're in the same boat, fear not ... Code Unknown will still speak to you, even if you're unsure how to break its ciphers.
(This film is rated AA)
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