FILM SCREENINGS

Code Unknown: Incomplete Tales of Several Journeys

2000. France/Germany/Romania. Directed by Michael Haneke. Screenplay by Haneke. With Juliette Binoche, Thierry Neuvic. Casual cruelty leads to racial confrontation on the streets of Paris. What follows in Haneke's ingeniously structured, volatile film confounds every expectation. A beggar woman turns out to be a dignified grandmother providing for her village in Romania; a sheltered actress (played with astonishing range by Binoche) becomes the unfortunate victim of a biased assault; a righteous war photographer casts a cold eye on more immediate sufferings; and a noble-minded young man of West African background proves hotheaded and self-serving. With its multiethnic cast—speaking at each other in a linguistic cacophony, including sign language—and its jarring confusion of reality and artifice, splintered narrative, and radical use of offscreen space and sound, Code Unknown envisions twenty-first-century civilization on the verge of imploding. Courtesy Leisure Time Features. In various languages; English subtitles. 118 min.