Code unknown: incomplete tales of several journeys

On a busy street on St Germain des Pres in Paris, an actress on her way to an audition is confronted by her partner’s brother who has run away from the family farm and wishes to stay at her apartment. She gives him the code for entry but warns him that when his brother Georges returns from taking war photographs in Kosovo, he will have to leave. In anger the youth throws litter onto the lap of a Romanian beggar and is then confronted by an outraged African immigrant who demands he makes an apology to the woman. Filmed in a breathtaking nine minute long take, this initial scene becomes the frame around which “Code Unknown” interrogates the alienation and breakdown in social relations affecting the western world. From this initially confronting opening, the film becomes a sequence of scenes in which the traditional linear narrative structure of film is replaced with moments and fragments of disparate lives: the Romanian woman is deported back to her homeland only to begin again her attempt to illegally cross the border; the actress and the photographer passionately invest in their art and work meaning and purpose which is absent from their relationship; members of an immigrant Mali family attempt to negotiate the consequences on their culture and family of a move to France; a farmer is left alone on his farm as one by one his children refuse to carry on his work. Haneke’s films have often been accused of didactism and moralism (often by a defensive critical film culture which has abandoned political and metaphysical engagement for the laissez-faire aesthetics of denuded postmodernism), but as this film makes clear his commitment is to a critical and intellectually rigorous cinema which utilises modernist techniques to essay the state of contemporary social relations in Europe. His assured and daring mise-en-scene asks the viewer to “decipher” not only the film’s own structure but to also ask questions of what are the ethical and political codes now governing the cultures of the new post-Cold War capitalist world. “Code Unknown” suggest that this deciphering is difficult but crucial if we are to make sense of the dangers and tensions of a paradoxically multi-ethnic but highly socially segregated contemporary world. Though undeniably bleak, by refusing the pessimistic lure of nihilism, Haneke’s film legitimates the radical potential of film at the end of the century. With Juliet Binoche, Thierry Neuvic.