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A deaf girl is standing in a brightly-lit classroom, pantomiming
thoughts to other children who cannot hear. They are trying to
interpret the message she is sending from her backward body movements,
secret gestures and frantic facial expressions. Is she alone? She
shakes her head “No.” Does she have a bad conscience? No. Is she
sad? No. Angry? No. Imprisoned? No.
End of scene.
In the introduction to Code Unknown, Michael
Haneke makes it clear that he is unafraid to ask questions, even if he
knows that he will still leave them hanging in the air unanswered. Like
his 2001 La Pianiste, Haneke affords us fractured glimpses into
the lives of several individuals in the throes of social and moral
crises, demonstrating the inability we all have in effectively
communicating out of our daily patterns of self-serving isolation.
Code Unknown, however, greatly differs from La Pianiste in an
important way. La Pianiste is a frustrating and unrewarding
experience in which we impotently watch Isabelle Huppert morally plummet
until she is abruptly abandoned like one of Von Trier’s female martyrs.
In Code Unknown, Haneke brings denotative and connotative meaning
to a standstill – call it a code of its own – and the mazed experience
is the director’s most rewarding to date. Perhaps we could call it an
unresolved story that brings resolution as an afterthought, received
from both the fragmented narrative as well as the subtle lens that
manipulates the emotions of the human eye.
In the first nine-minute sequence of this complex
tale we are introduced through a horizontal tracking shot to the main
characters. Left to right, and then vice versa, in one long take we see
all who walk these Parisian streets: the highly esteemed businessmen,
the street musicians and beggars, those in a hurry just to catch the
next train. We meet our cast in a scene that crescendos from a brief
introduction to a violent conflict of interest.
Anne (Juliette Binoche), an actress, is on her way
to work when surprised by a sudden visit from her brother-in-law Jean (Alexandre
Hamidi). He has run away from his father’s farm and needs a place to
stay, so she hesitantly gives him the code to unlock the door of her
flat, reminding him that his stay needs to be brief. On his way the
brash young Jean uses the lap of a beggar, an illegal Romanian immigrant
named Maria (Luminita Gheorghiu), to discard his trash. At the sight of
this, Amadou (Ona Lu Yenke), a black Frenchman and teacher to the deaf,
takes offense, and a scuffle ensues. The police enter the scene.
Unfairly, Amadou is arrested and Maria is eventually deported.
There is brilliance in the way Haneke chooses to
film this. It has been said that any movement of the camera has an
ethical aspect to it. In 1959 Cahiers Du Cinéma critic Luc Moullet
famously put it this way: “Morality is a question of tracking shots.”
In one aspect, the tracking shot in the introduction is purely
verisimilitudinous: there is no other way to walk down a street than
proceeding straight forward. But the sweeping horizontal motion also
determines the relationship between artist, subject and observer. We
are immediately drawn into the burgeoning conflict between Jean and
Amadou because we have just walked these streets with them. In the
aftermath of the skirmish we also come to terms with a morality higher
than we know – we’ve witnessed a wrong in progress and are filled with
hope for a “higher good.” It is interesting that the director chooses
this “most ethical of all shots” to get his point across. He wants to
speak to the very way we receive film. In our hearts (through the
narrative) and eyes (through the aesthetics) we perceive the language of
cinema, defined by the codes in which it operates.
From here the story is told in a series of unbroken
takes, each of them having the same vibe as the story’s temperamental
birth. Between each scene there is a spacer – a blank slide – which
breaks the whole into smaller pieces, providing distance and a more
objective encounter with each event. We see Anne act out a scene for an
upcoming thriller, locked in a soundproof room by a murderer who wants
to see her “true face.” CUT. We see a shamefaced Maria return to her
love in Romania, in what must be one of the greatest scenes of an
embrace to grace the majesty of the cinema (note again the ripping
horizontal winds in the background). CUT. We see Anne’s boyfriend
Georges (Thierry Neuvic), a journalistic war-photographer, returning
from battle-tattered Kosovo and surreptitiously take pictures of
unsuspecting transients on the subway. CUT. We see Anne on the same
metro, harassed and even spat on by some wayward teens looking for
trouble. CUT.
Like 13 Conversations About One Thing and
its cousin Magnolia, the script is very human and it projects a
puzzled theme that has something to do with the interconnection between
classes, ages, race and culture. It seems to be speaking to us about
the barriers of language, and getting past the obstacles that hinder us
from social justice. It shows different forms of cruelty, and at the
same time, Haneke convolutes certain elemental scenes in a way that is
rather cruel to his audience (think Funny Games). We’re not
always sure whether we’re watching Anne in real life or Anne on the
stage, which sometimes manipulates our emotions in an unfair manner.
However, whether or not we consider a scene or two unfair doesn’t lessen
the impact of the experience as a whole. The cast keeps us engaged,
dealing with all of the struggles that befall them.
While we’re on the subject of the cast, it’s worth
noting that some of the best acting you might see is right here. In
particular, Juliette Binoche immerses herself in the most flawless
performance of her career. There are at least three scenes that stand
out as her greatest moments since Blue. Her electric presence on
the screen proves that when teamed with a Haneke or a Kieslowski she is
an artist who offers transcendence as a gift, taking us on a journey of
the surreal as opposed to merely mimicking another role. In the
powerful scene where she is accosted on the subway we see a dynamic
actress with amazing range. Her tears form a moral center for much of
the film’s psychology.
Towards the end we are given a moment to peruse
Georges’ photos of the hostility in Kosovo. “It’s easy to talk about
the ecology of the image and the value of the non-transmitted message,”
he says, “but what matters most is the end result.” In the final
moments a deaf drum ensemble breaks through our barriers of
understanding in a pulsating fashion, with the rip and crackle of the
snare drum. Again we note that the troupe is again dancing left to
right – horizontally – as in man’s relationship to man – in a rhythm
that carries with it the weight of the human pulse. Georges becomes the
only character to gaze upward, and we realize the vertical Code
Unknown that is the hope of glory. If the film is about
miscommunication horizontally, it also suggests in inability to connect
vertically.
There is a non-concrete world of languages and
abstractions tightly locked in the tiny frames of this film. Haneke has
created a masterpiece that may take several viewings to fully come to
terms with, each bringing with it a separate part of the combination.
See it once and you’ll wonder what the point was. See it repeatedly and
a labyrinth emerges, ready to be explored. Gratification is found in
interpreting the maze.
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