Code Unknown (2000)
Directed by Michael Haneke
A series of events unfold like a chain reaction, all stemming from a minor event that brings the film's five characters together. Set in Paris, France, Anne is an actress whose boyfriend Georges photographs the war in Kosovo. Georges' brother, Jean, is looking for the entry code to Georges' apartment. These characters' lives interconnect with a Romanian immigrant and a deaf teacher.
3 connections found
View:
3 connections, in both directions
What critics compared Code Unknown to
Durkin has clearly studied some masters of the subjective eye - Polanski (Rosemary's Baby, Repulsion) and Haneke (Cache, Code Unknown).
Haneke’s films always indict violence in the media, but Funny Games, as opposed to, say, Cache or Code Unknown, is more demonstrably self-aware in its message.
Haneke (whose masterworks include "Code Unknown" and "Cache") explains that his distinctively European film is "a reaction to ... the way American cinema toys with human beings ... [so that] violence is made consumable."
It's possible that Haneke may wish to say something about aggression and passivity, in which case, there's one scene in his Code Unknown (2001) that accomplishes this better than all of Funny Games.
When Haneke shatters the fourth wall here, as he famously did in his wonderful Funny Games, it is only to make us more aware of the inability of a film to truly answer the questions that he is posing.
Director Michael Haneke (Funny Games) keeps this shot going for some 10 minutes, always facing one direction and tracking up and down the street.
Austrian director Michael Haneke made a considerable impact back in 1997 with Funny Games, a truly terrifying film which managed to make its audience uncomfortably complicit in the activities of its two torturer/ killers.
Those who've experienced the piercing disturbances of Haneke's recent work, particularly ''Code Unknown" and the cruelly overlooked apocalypse parable ''Time of the Wolf," know that the provocations here will reach into the political.
The director has explored societal issues before in such films as "Funny Games," "Code Unknown" and "The Time of the Wolf," and he has also used video as a psychological tool in the early "Benny's Video," but never before has he so skillfully made a statement.
Some of his recent films include The Time of the Wolf, The Pianist, Code Unknown, and Funny Games â all of which reveal Hanekeâs vision of the human condition as a struggle against random obstacles and the negation of our complicity with those who oppress us.
In Code Unknown , he dealt with a group of people in Paris trying to cope with the exigencies of modern life, where predators and victims of hate abound.
In Code Unknown, an Arab youth dresses down a pretty stranger, then spits in her face.