Recensioni de* critic*

There’s a certain scene in Code Unknown that, long after everything else about the film fell away for me, my mind would return to regularly. Watching it again, after many years, was an anxious experience: I had forgotten the scene in question came so late in the film and so spent the duration breathing shallowly in anticipation. I’m talking about the métro scene.

Michael Haneke’s first film made in France, CODE UNKNOWN is the director’s finest achievement to date, a formally adventurous and socially astute account of modern social problems. The movie is structured like a puzzle; each scene transpires in a single long take that begins after the principal action has started and ends before it’s been resolved.

Code Unknown does not enact compassion on our behalf; it is instead brilliantly effective at making us pay attention to people who are passed over or cast aside, so that we can draw on our own compassion.

This isn't necessarily Haneke's best film (though it's certainly in the running), but it's definitely his least hectoring and (befitting its title) his most mysterious... Eventually, it becomes clear that Haneke is interrogating the idea of intervention, as it plays out between lovers, between strangers, and between nations. That may sound tediously academic, but Haneke's skill at orchestrating almost unbearably visceral confrontations makes it anything but.

In the film's closing moments, Michael Haneke renders each parallel storyline into dissolution and uncertainty. With the exception of the penultimate major sequence, a harrowing confrontation on the Paris Metro, which gives the film a degree of emotional symmetry, Code Unknown's trajectory almost exactly matches an unclenching fist around the audience's throat.

27 scenes, almost all shot in single takes without any cuts, ending brusquely by going to black screen, sometimes in mid-sentence. I realized later that Haneke isn't interested in simply working on one level (the personal) but simultaneously on several (familial, social, ethnic, political, moral, philosophical), which the amorphous structure of the movie seems to accommodate with great ease.

Intellectually, Code inconnu is fatuous, self-satisfied sermonising on the same level as the abominations of Frank Capra and Stanley Kramer. What saves it is its dazed visual beauty, its use of the coolest formalism to emotionally devastating effect (the camera is usually motivated by character movement, while characters literally cross the space of the frame as they try to interact).

Aptly subtitled "Incomplete Tales of Several Journeys," the best feature to date by Austrian director Michael Haneke (2000, 117 min.) is a procession of long virtuoso takes that typically begin and end in the middle of actions or sentences, constituting not only an interactive jigsaw puzzle but a thrilling narrative experiment.

The kind of art film that's rarely seen anymore -- the kind that trusts the audience to be as intelligent as the director.

Manages to disturb, getting under your skin whether you want it to or not.

Michael Haneke creates an intelligently constructed, compelling, provocative, and relevant observation on social inequity, the untenability of cultural assimilation, and the failure of communication in Code Inconnu. Presented as a series of dissociated episodes on the lives of the principal characters following the fateful (though seemingly trivial) transection, Haneke examines the ingrained social divisiveness, moral complacency, and created bounds of human interaction.

Austrian director Michael Haneke is a ruthless anthropologist of domestic nihilism, but his first French-language feature, Code Unknown, is also his most humane... Code Unknown is Haneke's most expansive and, oddly, hopeful work—not a gaze into the void, but a fierce attempt to scramble out of it.