Code Inconnu (2000)

☆ ☆ ☆ ☆

Code Inconnu (2000) – M. Haneke

In Paris, a white teenage boy throws some litter into a panhandling older Romanian woman’s lap and is told off by an older black youth and an altercation begins.  The cops arrive and take everyone away (blaming the black man, a first signal that the film is in some ways about racism and failures of multiculturalism).  Director Michael Haneke uses this incident, filmed in one long shot, as a starting place for a series of glimpses into the lives of those involved in or affected by this short moment in time.  For example, the white teen has run away from his rural home where his father (perhaps lonely, perhaps poor) is hoping to pass the farm down to him because his older brother, a photojournalist currently dating Juliette Binoche, has already moved to the city.  We see Binoche (playing actress Anne Laurent) both “in character” in films and plays and also on the Parisian street or metro – because the various episodes that Haneke shows us begin and end mid-stream, bookended with moments of black screen, it is often difficult to know what we are seeing: moments from the past, present, or future (relative to the key incident) and involving which characters (unknown until they appear)? The stories of the black youth (his family has legally immigrated from Mali and one of his sisters is deaf and mute) and the Romanian woman (she is an illegal immigrant who hopes to send money back to her family) are interwoven to paint a picture of the failures of French society (or any society) to come to terms with the needs for greater understanding that globalisation and multiculturalism require.  This description may make Haneke’s film seem straightforward but it is anything but.  Instead, the purpose of the various moments we see can be elusive, perhaps only providing some background to the very different existences of different people in Paris, perhaps showing us clashes between those people, and hinting only sometimes vaguely at motivations and larger themes (for example, about the reasons for immigration from Romania or Afghanistan).  As a starting place for a meditation on this changing world, at the start of the twenty-first century, it is never less than stimulating.