Code inconnu

Michael Haneke (2000)

An early and formally ingenious Michael Haneke piece:  like some of his later ones (Hidden, for example), Code Unknown becomes less rewarding to watch once you get used to the formal ingenuity and start to find it too salient.  The film’s title[1] hints at problems of understanding and communication, and these are soon in evidence.  In a prologue, a young girl performs a mime to a group of other, apparently deaf-mute children; they fail to guess what the girl means to convey.  In the story proper, and as usual in Haneke, the main female character is called Anne and the main male character Georges.  They are lovers; she (Juliette Binoche) is an actress; he (Thierry Neuvic) is a photojournalist.  At the start of the film, Georges is abroad on a work assignment (in Kosovo or perhaps some other part of the former Yugoslavia).   We learn this when, in the Paris street where she lives, Anne encounters Georges’s teenage brother Jean (Alexandre Hamidi), who has run away from his home in the country (he lives there with his taciturn farmer father).  Jean needs somewhere to stay and Anne, hurrying to get to an appointment, gives him the new access code to her apartment building.   Before rushing off, she also buys Jean a pastry.  He takes a couple of bites then puts the pastry back in its paper bag, which he chucks into the lap of a woman begging on the street.  This casual, unkind act generates much of what follows in Code Unknown.  A young black man, who witnesses the incident, accosts Jean and insists that he apologise to the beggar.  When Jean refuses, a scuffle ensues; the police appear and the black man is taken away in handcuffs.  Michael Haneke goes on to explore the lives of various people involved in this fracas, as well as the ups and downs in the relationship of Georges and Anne (who briefly reappears during the street scuffle – I didn’t understand why).  In the last scene of the film’s main action, Georges returns from another stint abroad to find that Anne’s apartment’s entrance code has changed again.  He can’t gain access to the building; he makes unsuccessful attempts to contact Anne by public payphone.   This rhyming sequence in the Paris street is followed by an epilogue that rhymes with the prologue.   This time, a child performs a mime to camera.  The responsibility for interpreting it falls squarely on the viewer of the film.

The intervening action covers plenty of geographical ground.   There are scenes in the home, on the outskirts of Paris, of the Malian immigrant family to which Amadou (Ona Lu Yenke), the young man outraged by the throwing of the half-eaten pastry, belongs.  The recipient of Jean’s contemptuous gift was Maria (Luminita Gheorghiu), a middle-aged Romanian, who came to France illegally to look for work and, after being questioned by the police, is deported; we see her back in her native Romania, where she’s part of a village community which, although poor, gives Maria an existence much more stable and sustaining than the one on offer in Paris.   Georges and his camera continue to travel; his frequent absences are a main reason for the increasing tensions between him and Anne but Haneke shows tensions too between different ethnic groups (which, of course, were what brought Georges to the Balkans).  Anthony Lane’s admiring New Yorker review of Code Unknown summarises well Haneke’s achievement in looking closer at the various people in his story:

‘You feel that Jean could have thrown the bag at a hundred other citizens, rich as well as ragged, and that Code Unknown could have come up with a tale—what Hollywood would call a back story—of equal breadth and grip for every single one.’

There’s also a potent recurring theme of children in difficulty or distress (adults too, of course, but the children make a particular impression).   Amadou’s younger brother is bullied at school.   Anne is disturbed by the cries of a child elsewhere in her apartment building; her concerns are vindicated when we see her and an elderly woman neighbour (Andrée Tainsy) attending the child’s funeral.  The deaf-mute children from the prologue reappear a couple of times and perform percussion numbers (this is the closest that Haneke comes to using music).  The audience of the film is thus made very aware of hearing sounds that the children producing the sounds can’t hear.

Except for the prologue and epilogue and the opening and closing episodes on the Paris street, every sequence of Code Unknown takes the form of a single, unedited take.  The effect of this (at least until you realise the device will be repeated throughout) is powerful.  The unerring gaze of the camera concentrates attention and allows you to pick up things going on at the margins as well as the centre of the shot.  The device also reinforces a sense of voyeurism – on the part of you the viewer and on the part of Michael Haneke’s camera lens.  (The people and places observed by Haneke often seem to be under a scrutiny more intense than is usual in a film.)  The black screen intervals between episodes – lasting only a couple of seconds but long enough to be noticeable – define what’s just been seen emphatically.  Yet the long-take technique pays diminishing returns:  you get to feel you’re often watching actual human behaviour and no more than that – or, to be more precise, fine naturalistic acting that delivers a vraisemblance of actual behaviour.   Haneke does have a strong dramatic sense, though.  It’s especially well illustrated by two (complementary?) sequences inside trains on the Paris metro.  In the first, and much the shorter, of these sequences, Georges watches a female fellow passenger with an interest that’s hard to read.   In retrospect, this seems like an entrée to the subway scene in which Anne has to sit and survive a young male passenger’s increasing verbal aggression (and considerable physical threat).   Here, Haneke builds initially unremarkable behaviour into something very upsetting.  It’s striking too that both the kid who assails Anne on the train and the man who comes to her aid look to be of mixed race.

Juliette Binoche’s acting is especially fine in the subway sequence but her playing throughout is remarkable:  because she is so much more familiar than anyone else in the cast, her achievement in never seeming false or histrionic is admirable.   The same applies, inevitably to a lesser extent, to other good actors whom you know from other (though later) roles – particularly Thierry Neuvic (Love Like Poison) and Luminita Gheorghiu (The Death of Mr Lazarescu and Cristian Mungiu’s films).   As might be expected, Binoche’s character is an actress chiefly so that Haneke can do plenty of juxtaposing of Anne (a) being Anne and (b) playing a role on stage or screen.  The episode in and around a swimming pool at the top of a high-rise building (from which the famous image of Binoche’s anguished face, used to advertise Code Unknown, derives) is the most melodramatic and obvious of these ‘pretend’ sequences.  Binoche, in all of them, brilliantly expresses the near-indivisibility of Anne’s real self and her artistic inventions of self.

12 September 2015

[1] The full title is Code Unknown: Incomplete Tales of Several Journeys (Code inconnu: Récit incomplet de divers voyages).