trendaway.com

I just finished watching, rather, fast-forwarding through, Michael Haneke’s Code Unknown. I really enjoyed the filming techniques: a mixture of a fixed camera (where a lot of the action takes place off-screen) and long, moving shots (where characters are followed). I also liked the fact that the dialogue was in a number of languages: French, Malinka, Romanian, German, English, Arabic and French Sign Language.

That being said about the dialogue, there wasn’t enough of it to keep me interested. One of the things I look for in film is realisitic dialogue, and I tend to lose patience when I’m forced to just watch people doing whatever they’re doing. Maybe I wasn’t in the right mood to watch a guy play with his camera, ride the subway, or watch a bunch of people dancing at a wedding party. The film follows a bunch of characters in short scenes that I couldn’t really find any common ground between. They are all somehow linked, of course, but maybe I would have noticed more if I hadn’t been fast-forwarding through it. Often, scenes were cut off suddenly. A few of them were quite compelling, but I found myself too bored to really care about what was going on.

From what I gathered, the film dealt with issues such as racism, the class system and … yellow? I think that the director may have been trying to use the colour as a metaphor, as there seemed to be a lot of yellow items, and people (in the rare moments where they spoke) would mention the yellow items.

I have accidentally picked up my sister’s bad habit of fast-forwarding through movies; either that, or I’m just picking the wrong ones to watch.