Code inconnu: Récit incomplet de divers voyages
Code Unknown 2000 (France/Germany/Romania) 117min
在圖書館看到這部電影驚喜萬分, 奧地利導演Haneke的風格非常鮮明, 呈現大都會裡人心的空虛, 孤獨, 難以溝通, (女演員Anne和她戰地記者男友Georges的相對無言, Georges對難過的父親說不出安慰的話, 鄰居受虐小女孩的事件等等) 對外國人的仇視, 偏見, 種族歧視, (開頭近十分鐘一鏡到底交代街頭紛爭的始末) 東歐/非洲移民的處境, (非法移民Maria默默的被遣返, 再默默地回到巴黎痛哭失聲) 質疑影像的真實, 虛構和操弄之間的界線.
這種 impossibility of communication 的老套主題到了Haneke手裡, 用他冷眼旁觀的長鏡頭, 每個人物情節嘎然而止的剪接, 讓電影變得非常犀利而發人深省, Juliette Binoche 在這部電影的發揮比導演後來的”Hidden隱藏攝影機“更精湛, 利用這個女演員彩排拍攝電影的戲中戲, 導演大大愚弄了觀眾對影像的認知, 也展現了Haneke其實深知如何用場面調度抓住觀眾的情緒, 只是他不願這麼做而已. 我很喜歡Georges在科索沃和地鐵人物的照片這兩段. 電影最後, 因為門鎖密碼以改Georges進不了家門, 是對電影名稱Code Unknown的明喻, 但其實整部電影都緊扣這個主題.
雖然只看過Hidden和Code Unknown, 但我超愛Michael Haneke的風格.
Sight & Sound review by Richard Falcon
Code Unknown, on the other hand, furthers Haneke’s project of countering what he sees as the degradation of our sense of the real by modulating with true virtuosity between various realisms. The opening sequence is by turns manipulative- stoking our indignation at the policemen’s casually insensitive and implicitly racist handling of the confrontation between Jean and Amadou- and naturalistic, artfully thwarting our desire to reach easy judgement. In a later sequence in the Métro, a static camera observes in neutral long shot- again with an unbroken take- as Anne is tormented by an aggressive Arab youth who, incensed by her lack of reaction to his unprovoked taunts, spits in her face.
In between the film presents us with fragments- interspersed with Brechtian fades and sudden Godardian sound edits- which turn on the difficulty of relating in a moral fashion to others in a world in which any communication seems fraught with the dangers of victimisation.
… Alongside this quotidian malaise are the characters’ attempts to achieve contact through dissimulation, such as when Anne challenges her elderly neighbour, who may or may not have written a letter purporting to be from an abused child in the adjoining apartment, or when Anne, during an argument with Georges, claims- we don’t know whether it’s true or not- to have aborted his child when he was in Kosovo. Georges’ own subterfuge, his surreptitious photographing of people on the Métro- a form of surveillance that leads to a marvellous montage of portraits (the work of war photographer Luc Delahaye)- further complicates the film’s insistent thematic build-up around responsibility to others and the unbridgeable glacial distance between people.
As Haneke has suggested in interviews, all of this would merely be a reiteration of various modernist clichés about the impossibility of communication were the film not to comprise one superb sequence after another. Rather than dryly demonstrating a thesis, each scene conveys a deeply affecting sense of authenticity and immediacy.
…A sequence from the film she is shooting (she plays an actress), in which she is interrogated- one of two startling scens that reveal Haneke’s grasp of the strength of our desire to be manipulated (the other- at first deliberately confusing levels of reality – involves a toddler crawling on the edge of a tall building)- is a masterclass in close-up acting. That amid all these heavy-duty moral/aesthetic preoccupations Haneke manages to offer powerfully understated images of the lot of economic migrants- Maria’s silent deportation and return to Paris- adds to the sense of Code Unknown as a major achievement.
Orchestrating his long takes, his superb use of off-screen space and chilly long shots, Haneke sets about if not reinventing, then reinvigorating a non-naive realism for the 21st century. In the process, he gives us the most intellectually stimulating and emotionally provocative piece of European cinema of recent times.
