Code Unknown
Written and directed by Michael Haneke
France/Germany/Romania, 2000
Michael Haneke’s Code Unknown, the director’s 2000 follow-up to his brilliant 1997 film Funny Games, opens on group of deaf children playing sign-language charades. It’s an oddly provocative opening, in that it instantly leaves one to speculate where such a scene is heading, and yet is curiously soon forgotten as the film proper begins, only to be recalled again at the very end of the movie. While this may appear as an arbitrary insertion of an apparently irrelevant parenthesis, there proves to be more to the inclusion than one could initially gather when the scene is first presented. It would indeed be impossible to understand its full significance until the film concludes, for like these children attempting to guess the phrase or word mimicked by another, Code Unknown is itself about figuring out behavior, trying to deduce and...
Written and directed by Michael Haneke
France/Germany/Romania, 2000
Michael Haneke’s Code Unknown, the director’s 2000 follow-up to his brilliant 1997 film Funny Games, opens on group of deaf children playing sign-language charades. It’s an oddly provocative opening, in that it instantly leaves one to speculate where such a scene is heading, and yet is curiously soon forgotten as the film proper begins, only to be recalled again at the very end of the movie. While this may appear as an arbitrary insertion of an apparently irrelevant parenthesis, there proves to be more to the inclusion than one could initially gather when the scene is first presented. It would indeed be impossible to understand its full significance until the film concludes, for like these children attempting to guess the phrase or word mimicked by another, Code Unknown is itself about figuring out behavior, trying to deduce and...
- 11/12/2015
- by Jeremy Carr
- SoundOnSight
Over the past two decades, Austrian auteur Michael Haneke has grown into one of the most formidable cinematic titans currently working today. Winning five awards for his six times competing at Cannes (including Palme d’Or wins in 2009 and 2012), several of his prominent early titles tend to be overlooked in broad discussions concerning the filmmaker’s continued observation of humankind’s increasing inability to communicate.
A purveyor of social maladies, usually within an isolated microcosm, Criterion’s restoration of his first French production, 2000’s Code Unknown, is a perfect opportunity to revisit a prescient example of greater cultural shifts and conflicts to come. Although contemporary audiences might be tempted to lump this early title from Haneke into a movement of cinema from this particular decade wherein interconnected vignettes became a popular format, this compilation of one shot, single-takes is beyond comparison with the glut of busy-bodied melodramas eventually running this composition tactic into the ground.
A purveyor of social maladies, usually within an isolated microcosm, Criterion’s restoration of his first French production, 2000’s Code Unknown, is a perfect opportunity to revisit a prescient example of greater cultural shifts and conflicts to come. Although contemporary audiences might be tempted to lump this early title from Haneke into a movement of cinema from this particular decade wherein interconnected vignettes became a popular format, this compilation of one shot, single-takes is beyond comparison with the glut of busy-bodied melodramas eventually running this composition tactic into the ground.
- 11/10/2015
- by Nicholas Bell
- IONCINEMA.com
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