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I love this movie so much

Highly Overrated But Still Good

A great movie, one of the best of this year. There was a bit of confusion at one point in the plot, but nothing serious.

Great example of an old-fashioned, pure-at-heart escapist event movie that doesn't pretend to be anything that it's not and has boat loads of fun being its own ludicrous self.

Dense, intense meditation on our perceptions of race and "otherness," often puzzling but still cautiously recommended. Seems like the prototype for all those millennial films like Babel, Crash and 21 Grams that explored the unsuspected connections among a group of strangers. The long (almost) opening sequence—white French kid (sullen, kind of a dick) is rude to Rumanian beggar, black French kid (high minded but combative) tries to make him apologize, a scuffle ensues, the cops are called—is riveting, but some of the later doc-style scenes are hard to follow (the African-born matriarch of the black kid's family has a couple of monologues that were a little too old-country for me to make much sense of) and some of it just seems like random footage (if I had to watch an actress doing her ironing, it would prob'ly be Juliette Binoche, but still…). It also seems at times like Haneke's messing with us (some kind of Brechtian alienation tactic?…whatevs!), but the main plot, which involves JB's character, two films and a play she's performing in, her war correspondent boyfriend and his screwed-up family, is fairly compelling; the scenes shot in Rumania, with only a rudimentary storyline, are pretty interesting too. If you think you won't be too annoyed by Haneke's auteurist antics, you should definitely check it out.

So this is my third foray into the cinematic world of Michael Haneke (the first two being the frustrating-but-still-good Cache and the brilliant La Pianiste). Code Unknown is definitely thought-provoking, on many levels. I appreciate the way he gives the film a secondary title, Incomplete Tales of Several Journeys; this warns us going in that what we will experience is not yer basic 3-act presentation with a beginning, middle and a spoon-fed end.Code Unknown is, instead, just what he tells us to expect - little 'snippets' of several different characters' lives, after these lives intersect near the start of the movie. Each scene goes to black just when we're either getting emotionally into it or trying to figure out why it's being shown in the first place. The first time this happened, in fact, I thought there was something wrong with the VHS copy I was watching (the movie is available in this format very cheaply, by the way, through half dot com). Once I realized this was part of the movie and started expecting it - Haneke has to train his viewers to experience his films! - this technique was bearable and of course a huge part of the film's structure, a clever and effective way to portray these incomplete journeys.I also appreciate how Haneke continually subverts the standard feature film process by finding creative ways to NOT tell his stories. He has a great quote here at IMDb where he states, "A feature film is twenty-four lies per second." I like that. And I mostly agree with him; the majority of commercial movies (the big mainstream blockbusters in particular, the formula-type movies) are worthless garbage because they show and tell us nothing new, it's the same crap recycled yet once again for mass consumption; they are films made without heart or soul, produced purely for the purpose of making money. This is not to say that there aren't some worthwhile mainstream movies created. I'm not a film snob, not one of those people who thinks that a film is worthwhile only if it has sub-titles and is filmed in blurry black and white with a rain-stained hand-held camera. I enjoy sitting in a dark theatre with popcorn sometimes, too, seeing a film that is not delving into the Big Unanswerable Questions of life on the planet. I can thoroughly get off on a light comedy, say, that leaves me smiling at the end, so long as it's well-written and has some sort of original slant in the way it's presented. On the other end of the spectrum, I'm almost always up for an intellectually stimulating film, the art film, the non-popcorn movie. He has another statement here at IMDb which I agree with 100%, about how when a book is read, that book is experienced differently by every reader because the reader brings his or her own perspective and perceptions along into the pages. He said he feels the same is true with a film, that no two people will see the same movie, and this is completely valid, no question. With Code Unknown, this is definitely the case. The thing I found most revealing, for me, while watching it, is how much I rely on finding someone in a movie that I can relate to, or sympathize with, or at the very least, like (or even strongly dislike). There was no character that fit any of those categories in Code Unknown for me, not really. But I still enjoyed the film because I realized it was challenging my own perception of what a film 'should' do for the viewer. I was watching a movie that was saying to me, "I didn't make this film so YOU could like it, this is THEIR story." And as the viewer, I could choose whether to keep watching or say "the hell with this." I chose to watch. At the end, I felt a little disoriented, sure, and not entirely certain of what I had seen. But we all feel like that, don't we, to some extent, every day.

This would seem to be a collection of people and situations meant to show us the underbelly of modern France. In fact, the only common theme would appear to be a politically correct view of illegal immigrants. Even this would have been OK, had it been done artfully. As it is, the film jumps around without much cohesion (apparently this is supposed to make viewers think. I found it amateurish). There is not a single instant of joy or even of contentment: everything is dreary, sad and miserable. Insofar as I am concerned, this is one of those films that justify Samuel Goldwyn's famous words to his scriptwriters, "If you have a message, go to Western Union!". Hard to believe Juliette Binoche let herself be captured for this. Absolutely sleep-inducing and best avoided.

"Unknown Code: Incomplete Tales of Several Journeys (Code inconnu: Récit incomplet de divers voyages)" is a fascinating exploration of communication, using all the elements of film to create a trompe l'oeil of sight, sound and character interactions.We see extended vignettes of people tangentially related through an accidental intersection in Paris. In a brief interview on the Sundance Channel, where I viewed the film, writer/director Michael Haneke said he specifically selected Paris because it is one of the few European cities whose multiculturalism is so visible. We see here how it attracts immigrants not only as traditionally from the rural countryside, but now from Eastern Europe and Africa.Though not as violent as the incidents in "Amores perros", released the same year, or the later "Crash," the unsettling confrontation influences the characters' perceptions, of each other and of authority figures. We see them made sensitive to how people look, how people talk to each other, the sounds they make, and, even more importantly, shades how they interact. We see how differently people communicate with their own families, with their friends, their parents, their children, their colleagues, their lovers or their advisers, particularly through simple life cycle events.Sometimes Michael Haneke toys with us, as the camera moves back and reveals that a poignant situation isn't as dire as we thought, particularly playing on the terrific Juliette Binoche's well-known image as a beautiful actress (and yes, she does look beautiful even standing around in lingerie ironing while watching TV). Or he plays ironic tricks – having deaf kids do emotional charades or perform in a marching drum band or creating ambiguity about a door entry code to reinforce a theme of restless homelessness. We see lovers who communicate passionately without words, in one lovely scene even without touching. (I wonder if this scene with these two inspired a related scene in Rodrigo García's recent "Nine Lives.") One key character is a self-righteous photojournalist (really stereotypically portrayed by bearded, hunky, disheveled Thierry Neuvic in a multi-pocketed vest with an ever-present camera around his neck) documenting ethnic cleansing in Kosovo or taking candid portraits of unaware subway passengers. But he is helpless at assisting his rebellious teen brother or sullen farmer father or estranged young son. Issues of responsibility to neighbors and passersby is viscerally shown to be not the extreme goal of stopping genocide, but rather providing dignity to a fellow human being or simply listening to what's happening next door and acting on it.Haneke provides sympathetic insight into the inner lives of African immigrants, with an ear to how happenings look different to Western rationalists than to those used to revelations of divine and interpretive meanings, particularly in dreams, or sense of time.But while he is very sympathetic to the pushes and pulls of immigration that change people's place in society from matriarch to "the gypsy" as the universal "other" who everyone higher up in society puts down, the family scenes in the Romanian village are more stereotyped, with ethnic wedding dancing.Haneke's disarmingly passive style, with almost no music or cinematic affectations (he even mocks his Dogme-style use of sound by showing actors in the film-within-a-film re-dubbing dialog lost to a passing airplane) does make us feel like voyeurs, with each vignette constructed in a single take. In the filmed interview he said the key opening scene took 32 takes before he was satisfied.