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Code Unknown: Incomplete Tales Of Several Journeys: Review

CODE UNKNOWN: INCOMPLETE TALES OF SEVERAL JOURNEYS | CODE INCONNU: RECIT INCOMPLET DE DIVERS VOYAGES
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An interesting departure for Austrian director Michael Haneke, whose best-known films take an often brutal look at violence and spectatorship (witness 1997's disturbing FUNNY GAMES). Here, Haneke and the great German cinematographer Jurgen Jurges present a portrait of life in Paris as lived by a group of very different characters, lives touched by violence of a painfully ordinary nature: domestic abuse, indifference, lies, casual racism and prosaic humiliations. The central character is aspiring actress Anne Laurent (Juliette Binoche), who's currently shooting a thriller about a psychopath who "collects" unsuspecting women. Anne's boyfriend, danger-seeking photojournalist Georges (Thierry Neuvic), is in Kosovo when his younger brother, Jean-Pierre (Alexandre Hamidi), arrives in Paris and catches Anne on a busy street. Jean-Pierre has run away from his father (Djibril Kouyaté) and his dreary life on the family farm, and begs Anne for a place to stay. Anne eventually agrees, and as Jean-Pierre walks away, he cruelly tosses a paper bag into the lap of Maria (Luminita Gheorghiu), a Romanian illegal immigrant who's panhandling outside a bakery. Amadou (Ona Lu Yenke), the son of West African immigrants, accosts Jean-Pierre and demands he apologize to Maria, but the ensuing scuffle brings the police into the situation. Amadou is arrested, Maria is deported and Jean-Pierre walks away unscathed. Anne, meanwhile, suspects her neighbors are physically abusing their 10-year-old daughter, but does nothing about it, not even when she receives an anonymous letter asking for her to do so. When George returns to Paris, Anne berates him for his inability to take responsibility for anything and cruelly tells him she's aborted their baby while he was away. George leaves for Kabul, and Anne has a frightening encounter on the Metro. Haneke strings together a series of individual scenes of varying length that, with a few interesting exceptions, consist of brilliantly choreographed single takes. The first — Anne's encounter with Jean-Pierre on a crowded Paris street, which ends with Amadou's arrest — lasts nearly 10 minutes. Later, the camera catches Anne, George and their friends dining at a bistro, travels across the room to the table where Amadou and his date have just been seated, then returns; only when Haneke plays on the viewer's relationship to real life as opposed to film life does he use cuts. With virtually no music and very little expository dialogue, this is one of the rare films with enough faith in moviegoers to let them figure things out for themselves. leave a comment --Ken Fox
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