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Code Unknown Peter Preston
Why - ask the question four times over - don't French festival directors think much of modern British movies? Go to Code Unknown, a winner at Cannes 2000, and see for yourself. Directors like Michael Haneke - an Austrian in Paris and a Cannes winner again this year - are tackling themes and perfecting techniques which leave us trailing. For most of the time here, you're brilliantly instructed and involved. These 'incomplete tales of several journeys' make up yet another tapestry film, but one that hangs loose rather than draws the threads together. A Romanian beggar woman squats in the Boulevard St Germain, hands outstretched. A farmer's son, leaving home in crisis, hurls a bundle of paper at her. An outraged immigrant teacher of deaf kids remonstrates. You can't treat people like that - apologise. No apology. They fight. Some cops arrive and automatically cart the black teacher off to the cells. The ratty son goes to lodge with the actress girlfriend (Juliette Binoche) of his photographer brother. And then Haneke moves onward and outward, exploring his separate characters in the little boxes of their lives. What's good - and brave - is the way the teacher (Ona Lu Yenke) and the Romanian beggar (Luminita Gheorgihiu) are humanised in a world of systematic demonisation. Haneke shoots their scenes with artful, almost documentary restraint - real people, good people caught up in an official degrada tion which degrades us too as we watch. What's perhaps less completely successful is the relationship between Binoche and her distant lover (Thierry Neuvic), a drifting apart of reality interspersed by scenes from pictures Binoche is making which seem, for a while, to be real as well. Fragmented souls in a fragmented society, looking for a key to survival, code unknown. Haneke set out to make a movie about immigration and wound up making one about life. It is eloquent and compelling and, in constantly changing episodes, it lives on a cutting edge. No conventional end? A drifting close? But no one has the code. Haneke's Romanian village is warm, complete, enclosed in all but poverty. Venture beyond and your universe implodes. From film.guardian.co.uk
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