Week 6

I almost regret choosing to review this film. I’m a Haneke fan, but Code Unknown (one of his more enigmatic works; and that’s saying something), was horribly difficult to wade through and form a coherent opinion of. I had to unravel the films ambiguities first, find what for me was Haneke’s intent and then to that respond as best I could. But I feel I’ve benefited from the exercise, along the lines of reading something out of your usual range to forcibly increase vocabulary (if that makes sense).

Haneke has called himself cinemas last modernist, and his lurching still cam is testament to this confession, an unswerving devotion to a particular style that doesn’t pander to audiences, even gleefully alienates them; and as with the modernists, his primary concerns have been dredging hideous examples of subversion in evidence of how powerless is societal regulation to subdue humanity’s ‘mean streak’. Personally, human ‘nature’ isn’t a comfortable idea being too absolute, and I’m more akin with Locke’s concept of tabula-rasa; the idea that we’re blank-slates from birth, and though biological forces are an undeniable influence, character is for the most part shaped progressively by the decisions our circumstantial existences force us to make.  

There’s a misanthropic cynicism running through Haneke’s work which is ‘enjoyable’ as a sick joke, but is too negative to be considered serious meditation on human morality and ‘the void’. This raises interesting points about the varying reasons why a reviewer finds his or herself unable to respond positively to a film, whether they couldn’t find any agreement with the directors world view,  or were underwhelmed by an execution that failed to match even the grandest premise. Certainly, Haneke’s execution is deliberately fragmented, which contrasts with the obviousness of his aims, which are to sketch the abysmal proportions of the contemporary communication glitch.  But then this also mirrors the idea of communication breakdown, so that his super-pixellated vignettes that devolve into gibberish are a narrative device, in which non-linear storytelling is itself a thematic element.

Arguably then, Haneke’s ‘failure’ to make any memorable points concerning the sociological maelstrom he conjures, could be considered ‘the point’. That audiences may’ve been expecting Haneke’s version of a resolution was another ‘point’; when did he communicate that he’d been brainstorming solutions to the broadest communication issues, to the post-colonial wounds the film briefly touches, to the age-old enigmas of love? These expectations, so it’s smugly implied by Haneke, are the result of yet another communication breakdown. God, when will it end!?!