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The Michael Haneke Collection
RRP: £27.99
Our Price: £15.39 (subject to change)
Brilliant Art-House Cinema
Review date: 2007-05-20 Rating: 10 out of 10
In the multimedia world, most of the information we absorb is simple and designed to grab your attention. Political ideas are reduced to simple messages for mass consumption. I'm interested in contemporary city life, especially its diversity and complexity.
I lived for nine years in central London. I moved out three years ago, and I've found it difficult to express what an overwhelming and difficult experience it was. Then I saw Michael Haneke's Hidden - the story of a well-to-do professional family in Paris, which is drawn into contact with an immigrant family on the other side of the tracks. The encounter shows the weaknesses in urban family life, the pressures, the loneliness, the difficulty of communicating, the animosity and impatience when confronted to people who don't share your values.
Haneke creates mood by focusing the camera on buildings for long periods. He films very banal events, which are affecting because they are familiar to you. In Code Unknown, we watch Binoche ironing a T-shirt for nearly five minutes. But during that scene she hears a child being hit by a parent in a neighbouring flat. I remember a similar experience. My flatmate, who I disliked, was being beaten by her boyfriend. I didn't know what to do. She didn't like me, either. It was a big turning point in my life, because I realised there are brutal things in life going on, but what am I supposed to do?
The subject matter of the Piano Teacher is at times, repulsive: perversion, disturbing fantasy, a highly dysfunctional relationship between mother and daughter. Who would want to pay good money to see this? But it is not a self-indulgent wallowing in horrible things. It does say something very plausible about the way human relationships go.
Time of the Wolf is an apocalyptic film. It shows human beings deprived of their dignity in a desperate situation. Of the four films, it's the hardest, but it helps to define how Haneke works as a film-maker.
Code Unknown has some really dull scenes: a tractor plouging a field, a man giving a motorbike to his son, a ride in a car through a Rumanian village. But there is one ten-minute scene, when the Juliette Binoche character gets some abuse from an Arab boy on the Metro. It gives you a feel of how vulnerable you are on the tube. Nobody springs to her defence at the beginning. She moves. He follows. Then he spits in her ear. Another Arab man goes to kick him, and you expect a fight to break out. The boy stays on the train, and you think the altercation is over. Then he gets off, turns and shouts into the carriage, making everyone jump with shock.
This short scene says many things about what it's like to live in an international city: the hostility, the kindness, the chaos, the fear, the vulnerability.
Code Unknown ends by following the Binoche character as she comes out of the Metro station and goes into her flat. What's that all about? Well, if you've lived in London, Paris or New York, it says how lonely and hard urban life is. How many things you have to deal with, how fragile your relationships are. How difficult it is to express and fulfill your desires and wishes.
Pretentious, yes, difficult, yes, boring, a bit, commercial, hardly, critically successful, not really, but somehow Haneke says things on film that you can't put into words.
Similar Products
- The Michael Haneke Trilogy
- Funny Games [1997]
- Luis Bunuel collection [1965]
- The Louis Malle Collection - Vol. 1
- Sátántangó [1994]
Product Details/Specifications
Actor(s):
Juliette Binoche
Daniel Auteuil
Beatrice Dalle
Isabelle Huppert
Thierry Neuvic
Director(s):
Recording label: Artificial Eye
Manufacturer: Artificial Eye
EAN: 5021866330303
Binding: DVD
Number of items: 4
Format: Anamorphic, PAL,
Release date: 2006-10-09
Aspect ratio: 1.85:1
Audience rating: Suitable for 18 years and over
Region code: 2
Running time: 461 minutes
Language: English (Subtitled)
Language: French (Original Language)