Review from Sight and Sound [Full Review Here]
"Morality," Cahiers du cinéma critic Luc Moullet famously said in
1959,"is a question of tracking shots." Michael Haneke's first — predominantly-
French-language film begins with an exquisitely realised nine-minute tracking
shot initially following Juliette Binoche's Anne as she walks along the street.
Were this not a Haneke film, it would be tempting to view these opening moments
as a homage to the nouvelle vague film-makers' fondness for long-take sequences
that juxtapose a beautiful actress with a Parisian boulevard caught in real
time. But as in Haneke's earlier 71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance and
The Seventh Continent, both of which introduce the fragmented, episodic narrative
structure employed in Code Unknown, Haneke is concerned here with philosophical
first principles rather than referentiality. As this sequence-shot bears witness
to the sudden street incident that links the disparate experiences of Maria
(a Romanian immigrant), Amadou (the son of West African refugees), Anne, and
Jean (the brother of Anne's boyfriend Georges), the film offers the first of
a number of scenes which use the multicultural public spaces of Paris, not for
their fashionability (Haneke points out he could as easily have filmed his script
in London) but as a laboratory for testing the relationship between representation
and reality. The results confirm Haneke's reputation as one of cinema's most
accomplished moralists.
Both Benny's Video and Funny Games tended to didacticism and indulged Haneke's perverse modernist desire to punish us for our collusion with the commodified- and thus, for Haneke at least, mendacious- narrative certainties of dominant cinema. Code Unknown, on the other hand, furthers Haneke's project of countering what he sees as the degradation of our sense of the real by modulating with true virtuosity between various realisms. The opening sequence is by turns manipulative- stoking our indignation at the policemen's casually insensitive and implicitly racist handling of the confrontation between Jean and Amadou- and naturalistic, artfully thwarting our desire to reach easy judgement. In a later sequence in the Métro, a static camera observes in neutral long shot- again with an unbroken take- as Anne is tormented by an aggressive Arab youth who, incensed by her lack of reaction to his unprovoked taunts, spits in her face. In between the film presents us with fragments- interspersed with Brechtian fades and sudden Godardian sound edits- which turn on the difficulty of relating in a moral fashion to others in a world in which any communication seems fraught with the dangers of victimisation. Anne, while ironing, turns down the television when she hears screams coming from another apartment and this too is left unexplained and unresolved. Alongside this quotidian malaise are the characters' attempts to achieve contact through dissimulation, such as when Anne challenges her elderly neighbour, who may or may not have written a letter purporting to be from an abused child in the adjoining apartment, or when Anne, during an argument with Georges, claims- we don't know whether it's true or not- to have aborted his child when he was in Kosovo. Georges' own subterfuge, his surreptitious photographing of people on the Métro- a form of surveillance that leads to a marvellous montage of portraits (the work of war photographer Luc Delahaye)- further complicates the film's insistent thematic build-up around responsibility to others and the unbridgeable glacial distance between people.
As Haneke has suggested in interviews, all of this would merely be a reiteration of various modernist clichés about the impossibility of communication were the film not to comprise one superb sequence after another. Rather than dryly demonstrating a thesis, each scene conveys a deeply affecting sense of authenticity and immediacy. The performance of the deglamorised- but still luminescent- Juliette Binoche, whose approach to Haneke initiated the film, contributes immeasurably to the success of Code Unknown. A sequence from the film she is shooting (she plays an actress), in which she is interrogated- one of two startling scens that reveal Haneke's grasp of the strength of our desire to be manipulated (the other- at first deliberately confusing levels of reality - involves a toddler crawling on the edge of a tall building)- is a masterclass in close-up acting. That amid all these heavy-duty moral/aesthetic preoccupations Haneke manages to offer powerfully understated images of the lot of economic migrants- Maria's silent deportation and return to Paris- adds to the sense of Code Unknown as a major achievement. Orchestrating his long takes, his superb use of off-screen space and chilly long shots, Haneke sets about if not reinventing, then reinvigorating a non-naive realism for the 21st century. In the process, he gives us the most intellectually stimulating and emotionally provocative piece of European cinema of recent times.
By Richard Falcon for Sight and Sound
Review from Popcorn.co.uk
The world needs more filmmakers
like Austrian director Michael Haneke, artists who believe in using their chosen
medium to pose difficult moral questions rather than provide simplistic answers.
Written specifically for Juliette Binoche, 'Code Unknown: Incomplete Tales Of
Several Journeys' (to give it its full title) succeeds as a powerfully acted
and incisively directed examination of the ethical dilemmas facing modern urban
citizens.
Its fragmented narrative incorporates roughly a dozen different characters, who form a cross-section of ages, races and nationalities, and whose lives intersect in a series of partial vignettes.
Binoche plays Anne, an actress breaking into the film industry in Paris, whose boyfriend Georges (Thierry Neuvic) is a war photographer, recording atrocities in Kosovo. His brother, who has run away from the family farm, thoughtlessly provokes a Parisian street scuffle, which sees an immigrant beggar deported back to Romania, and the innocent Amadou (Ona Lu Yenke) - a teacher of deaf children - arrested by the police. Later Anne becomes worried by the mysterious screams of a child in her apartment block...
As with the provocative black comedy 'Funny Games', Haneke displays a concern for how cinema depicts "reality" and the impact this representation has on spectators. Here he adeptly switches between cinematic styles: several of the segments involving Binoche are films-within-a-film, and employ quick cutting and close-ups for their emotional effect. Elsewhere, in perhaps the most devastating scene, we watch in long shot as a static camera observes the actress's character being humiliated by a young Arab man on the Metro.
Many of the incidents that punctuate 'Code Unknown' revolve around the extent to which one can or should intervene in another person's problems, and Haneke complicates the issues by portraying the unforeseen negative consequences of supposedly well-intentioned actions. This is a resonant and richly accomplished film.
Review by Tom Dawson
Review from BBCOnline
Provocative, stimulating fare (both thematically and visually as Haneke presents us with various motifs of agit-prop cinema including exceedingly long takes, jarring fades and Godardian edits) it's also undeniably engrossing. Binoche - after a series of lesser parts - proves that she is one of the finest European actresses of her generation but she's more than matched by a faultless supporting cast, of which Lu Yenke is a revelation. European cinema at its very best.