Code Inconnu (2000)  ***

Reviewed 12/5/01

Michael Haneke is a director whose work one has to respect even if one cannot quite embrace them.  Few filmmakers try so hard to make their movies socially relevant without being maudlin.  The problem with Haneke films though is that he seems to almost disdain his audience.  In FUNNY GAMES, Haneke deliberately frustrates the viewer by altering the very rules of the game.  Here, he tosses in so much information and introduces so many characters in the beginning that it takes quite a while to sort out the associations.  Each scene is composed of a single shot, but Haneke is not the aesthete that Bela Tarr or the Taiwanese filmmakers are, so many of the shots are lackluster in framing and composition, and given their length, become quite tedious.  Still, several set pieces show Haneke’s masterful ability to manipulate the audience.  The most prominent among these is a disturbing one in which an Arab man harasses a Caucasian woman on a Paris subway.  The movie is about race relations in modern day Europe and Haneke presents this through an assortment of characters ala Robert Altman’s SHORT CUTS.  An actress (Juliet Binoche) loves a war photographer (Thierry Neuvic) whose teenage brother (Alexandre Hamidi) is running away from their farmer father (Josef Bierbichler) and performs an insulting gesture to a Romanian panhandler (Maimouna Hélène Diarra) and in return is attacked by a young politically conscious black man (Ona Lu Yenke) passing by.  We follow how their lives progress from there.