A Film About Distance
by Elizabeth Johnstone
New Years Eve, 2000. I was eleven, and I climbed a tree at my grandparent's house in San Antonio to watch the world end in a blaze of hard drives as we entered the new millennium. I didn't actually think it would, but lots of people sure were talking about it. My grandparent's neighbors stockpiled canned beans and flashlights. When the sky lit up at midnight, it was just fireworks.
Michael Haneke, the Austrian director and writer with a penchant for disturbing violence and twisted psyches, released the French film Code Inconnu that November. When I saw it just a few weeks ago, it reminded me of my time up in that tree- I was waiting for something to happen on screen that I knew had little chance of actually occurring. This is partly because The Unknown Code, as the title is translated in English, is accurately summarized by its subtitle: "incomplete tales of several journeys." The stories are indeed incomplete; there is little to no plot. The principal characters also have very little to do with each other, and yet, their lives connect briefly over the half-eaten pastry that Jean, a farm boy visiting Paris in search of his older brother Georges, tosses into a beggar's lap.
What fascinated me, however, was Haneke's idea that human nature is utterly incomprehensible. His film itself is incredibly confusing. He deliberately allows the camera to linger, unmoving, on scenes for minutes at a time without any discernable reason. But often, characters (people who lie and beg and yell and threaten) are cut off mid-sentence. He seems to have this idea that language is simply a filler for our lives; that we talk and talk and people either don't listen or don't understand. No amount of chatter will offer us what we truly need: shelter from the storm.
This is just my interpretation. Haneke said in an interview once that he wasn't going to tell anyone what he meant by Code Inconnu, that his films were more about asking questions rather than providing quick answers. Thus, I could be entirely wrong about all my interpretation.
But the thing is, I think the chance of being wrong is the point. The film opens and closes with a scene of deaf children playing a form of charades. One child standing in front of the group mimes an action, or perhaps an emotion, and the other children guess using sign language. But they are always wrong. Though they all speak the same language, the other children cannot figure out what the first child is trying to say.
People communicate, people talk to each other, at each other, around each other. We might listen, but do we understand? Whole nations, populations, cultures are divided over the inability to comprehend a different way of life, a different system of values irreconcilable with our own. Haneke, in Code Inconnu, touches on the very sticky and hugely political idea that serious conflict stems from our inability to understand other cultures. Georges, for example, is a photographer stationed in Kosovo trying to make sense of the war and his place in it. But despite the ease with which he communicates the horror he sees through his photographs, distributed in daily newspapers Georges is unable to tell his girlfriend, Anne, how utterly terrified he is because he barely understands it himself. Back home safe in Paris, he feels alienated by all the people with their cushy jobs and safe little lives. He is out of place and out touch though everyone speaks the same language, he cannot connect.
And though it touches these larger themes, the movie also explores the smaller confusions between parents and their children, between friends and between lovers. The tagline of the film is, after all, "love has a language all its own." Every so often, you find someone, and you love that person enough to think you can understand what it is they do not say. You spend hours on the painstaking examination of silences and gestures that touch or confuse you. You might even take pleasure from telling someone that the person you love knows you better than you know yourself. It's so easy to live with someone, love them, and think that you know them until the day that you don't know them at all.
Which begs the question, how can we be so wrong? What if we punch in the code as Georges does towards the end of movie when he arrives at Anne's apartment and finds he no longer knows the security code and we can't get in?
That's the chance we take. Plenty of critics think Michael Haneke got it wrong with Code Inconnu - it's a film about distance that most audiences couldn't connect with. The point, however, is to try. Knock on the door. If there's no answer, try again.
