71 Fragmente einer Chronologie des Zufalls (71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance) (1994)

A panel in Michael Haneke's trilogy about gratuitous acts of vioelnce and their devastating effects.

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."

[font=Century Gothic]"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?[/font]