Written and directed by Michael Haneke
Skipping ahead in time, leaping from place to place, jumping from fresh context to fresh context: life on film has rarely had as zig-zagging a presentation as it does in Michael Haneke’s Code Unknown, a multi-strand story involving tenuously connected characters who abutt, briefly, during a street altercation, and then unspool in their respective directions.
What happens next, and what it means, for the characters and the movie as a whole, is for us to try and suss out: an actress auditions, performs, is witness to domestic abuse, ponders her moral obligation, turns her anger towards her absent partner, a war photographer away on assignment; an aging farmer works to keep his livelihood afloat and son engaged in its future; an immigrant is deported, relishes life back in her native country, but ponders a return to Europe despite the much lower social standing that awaits her; a Frenchman with African roots bristles at the small prejudices he must endure because of the color of his skin.
A narrative juggling act, Code Unknown is Haneke toying with our expectations and us by extension. The human mind wants to understand, to arrange and make sense of what’s in front of us. The scenes of Haneke’s movie are presented in long unbroken takes, then conclude with a solid instant of darkness, signifying a harsh and abrupt cut. Light again: we’re with someone else, watching them doing something right in the middle of them doing it. How it relates to everything else, we can’t know for sure, not yet at least.
Haneke’s script doesn’t bridge any gaps, it practically inserts them with glee. The spatio-temporal leaps force you to reorient yourself at the beginning of every new scene and as the minutes pile on, your brain starts to growl, starved of the digestible sustenance that linear narrative, expository dialogue, and identifiable arcs afford us.
To some this may be infuriating, behavior dismissable as artistic pretension covering for a simplistic plot. To others, it may be compelling, this storytelling game of keep away.
Code Unknown is so much more than just scriptwriting gymnastics. Haneke’s scenes burn, alive and vital, on the screen. Many carry a terrible tension, showcasing Haneke’s ability to cut to the bone of civil society’s hangups, and you’ll spend these holding a breath you didn’t realize you were holding.
Others lay our nature bare with stunning ease. It’s this uncanny knack Haneke has, like he’s reaching into the ground, pulling out a handful of runny mud only to rinse it off and reveal the shimmering artifact that was hiding within. Life’s messy, our behavior governed by a cavalcade of impulses innate and learned. Yet, every scene in here shimmers as it shows a little part of the human condition. Vulnerable, cruel, graceful, vain, fearful, in love. Haneke can summon it all, suddenly, and with astounding power, a master at the height of his powers.
Code Unknown is a cinematic prose poem, playful and evasive, but the essential movie-going experience remains: small stories are told, with beginnings, middles, and ends, even if the stories are peripheral, even in how they tell themselves.
Haneke knows how to wrongfoot you, like he’s forcing you to pay a little more attention. It can feel confounding, cinema without the guardrails of understanding, but the feelings at play, whether that’s shame, guilt, doubt, hopelessness, shock, are evident. Code Unknown is life passing you by on the street and you trying to piece it all together, but Michael Haneke is right there next to you, insightful, evocative, and with a keen eye for human nature, drawing out what’s enduring and real in a transient existence.
Mikkel Frederiksen 