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Critics Consensus: Though challengingly cryptic at times, Code Unknown still manages to resonate.
Critic Consensus: Though challengingly cryptic at times, Code Unknown still manages to resonate.
All Critics (50) | Top Critics (15) | Fresh (37) | Rotten (13) | DVD (1)
The violence, in short, remains unseen, but that makes it no easier to bear; what lurks and wails behind a wall is, for Haneke, the most reliable wellspring of dread.
A procession of long virtuoso takes that typically begin and end in the middle of actions or sentences, constituting not only an interactive jigsaw puzzle but a thrilling narrative experiment.
A searing, structurally ingenious look at racial tension on the streets of Paris.
All this unrelenting bleakness would be fine if it went someplace interesting, but the film's themes never coalesce into anything beyond basic existential angst.
Despite the film's Bressonian rigours, its emotional force should finally give the lie to Haneke's reputation as a coldly academic film-maker.
At the center of the film -- the real reason it was made -- is Binoche, one of the genuinely radiant presences in movies today.
It's a great entry point to his filmography, serving as a good example of Haneke's visual and thematic style.
Code Unknown is an unusual example of a movie that is socially aware, but that is thankfully equally aware of how tiresome moralising and preaching can be.
This film, from Austrian director Michael Haneke, is one of the most uncompromisingly difficult and challenging of the year.
If some of the political theorising is somewhat naive and the direction is occasionally manipulative, the acting, particularly from Juliette Binoche, is superb.
Haneke brings his usual dark sensibility to bear on the multifaceted story, expressing the fractured quality of modern city life through scenes that wander through a labyrinth of missing links and lost connections.
With virtually no music and very little expository dialogue, this is one of the rare films with enough faith in moviegoers to let them figure things out for themselves.
An intelligent and post-structuralist narrative exercise that, shot in a series of single-take fragments, plays with the structural codes that form the basis of storytelling to reflect how people can't understand each other in this society with their very own signs (languages, gestures, cultures, moral values).
Super Reviewer
A strange tale, if indeed it can be called that. The subtitle, "Incomplete Tales of Several Journeys" sums it up pretty well. Juliette Binoche was lovely and carried the film. The rest was just window dressing and had no obvious connecting narrative, or meaning, beyond each individual scene. The use of jarring jump cuts from one scene to the next emphasized the discontinuity and left one somewhat bewildered as to how it all fit together. That obviously was the director's intention, but it just didn't work for this viewer. If this was supposed to spotlight the way the various characters interconnected, then it succeeded on only a most superficial level. Their lives may have intersected briefly, but one could hardly call it any more than that. Quite disappointing overall.
Very complex intertwining stories about life in modern society. Sort of like Crash, only for Adults.
An engrossing, cleverly constructed film from Michael Haneke (Hidden, The Piano Teacher). Since Haneke continually refuses to answer any questions regarding his films or the meaning of his themes (a word he hates), I can only offer my own opinion as to what is going on here.
Incomplete scenes showing moments in the lives of a French African teacher in a school for the deaf, a Romanian refugee, a photographer, a teenage runaway and an aspiring actress are cut together, possibly in sequential order, and intersect and connect in various, sometimes subtle ways. The film seems to be about the ways in which these characters feel alienated in society. There are breakdowns in communication because of generational differences, xenophobia, apathy, personal aspirations and more besides.
Each 'moment' finishes with an abrupt blackout, sometimes with characters in mid sentence, and the couple of seconds between two segments often feels likes a chance to absorb what is going on, or allow for a 'breather'. Aside from one ingenious segment where the question of reality comes into focus, each scene is filmed without cuts, either with the camera positioned statically or on tracks, which seems to both heighten realism whilst maintaining an artificial feel, if that's even possible.
I'm not exactly sure if the film is entirely successful and some of the scenes feel superfluous, but there's some gripping and thoughtful stuff here. Juliette Binoche is especially excellent as the actress, with one particularly stand-out scene where she rehearses for a film role direct to camera; her performance (of a performance) had me utterly gripped for the few minutes the section lasted.
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