This cerebral Austrian mystery, by avant-garde director Michael Haneke, will disturb those viewers with the patience to wade through it. The film begins with a grisly mass killing. It was Christmas eve 1993 and a 19-year old student inexplicably murders several people and then kills himself. The fragmented film flashes back to October 12 and then progresses toward the fateful night. Throughout the film many characters appear and suddenly reappear. A homeless teenaged Romanian exile roaming
Vienna's streets and begging provides continuity. Each fragment begins with a newscast that functions as a surreal Greek Chorus One shows footage of the war in Sarajevo, and the other is a story about Michael Jackson. ~ Sandra Brennan, Rovi
The film's Endsville, when we reach it, is almost an anticlimax, thanks to the masterfully orchestrated ensemble acting and the countless dramatic mini-explosions unleashed along the way.
Michael Haneke's death-of-the-soul-of-Europe saga soldiers on with 71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance, the final entry in his so-called "trilogy of emotional glacification."
"71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance" is a semi-interesting movie from Michael Haneke which serves as an exploration of his favorite themes of race and class. On December 23, 1993, a man kills three people in a bank in Vienna before killing himself. To show that no place is safe from violence, the movie rewinds two
months to show news footage of violence in other parts of the world such as Sarajevo, Turkey, Haiti and Somalia.(But what does Michael Jackson have to do with this? Or with anything really?) After that, random bits and pieces are shown from the lives of the people who are present at the shooting with a special focus on a Romanian boy(Gabriel Cosmin Urdes) who is in the country illegally and could have an entire movie made about him. But none of the characters are as intriguing and the movie comes to a halt during a prolonged phone call. And why does a movie about alienation have to be quite so alienating?
December 18, 2008
Walter M.
Super Reviewer
This movie splices actors with news footage from the Clinton era. It was a little hard to understand sometimes, but it worked.I don't know why they put the news stories in there unless it was to show that it was a turbulent time for everyone. When the main character snaps and kills everyone, they stop making
sense.Weird movie.
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