It's perfectly easy to miss the point of Michael Haneke's curious, incomplete-feeling work, simply because it stares one in the face. Its story lines follow a number of apparently unconnected journeys: a woman whose photo-journalist husband is away at the wars, an African in Paris whose family disapprove of his white girlfriends, a Romanian girl suffering (and resisting) frequent deportations as an illegal immigrant and so on.
Two scenes register starkly: a street altercation between the African student and a French teen who has insulted a beggar that turns out particularly badly for the pied noir; and a very tense confrontation on the Metro when Juliette Binoche is stalked and harassed by an Arab.
The emotional landscape is observed with detachment; you have to connect the almost hidden dots to empathise with the characters or form the message, and it's hard. But it seems to be: "People meet without communicating." We knew that already, of course, but obfuscating the obvious seriously, deeply and humourlessly has never been a shortcoming of European art-house cinema.
Code Unknown (Code Inconnu)
Cert: 15
