24 March, 2006 | Leave a Comment

Last month I reviewed Michael Haneke’s film Hidden (Caché). Haneke is Austrian but he works in French (he directed The Piano Teacher with Isabelle Huppert). I was intrigued by his work and wanted to see more, which led me to rent the DVD of his 2000 film Code Unknown. The film stars Juliette Binoche, who was also in Hidden, playing a character with the same exact name. Many of the actors in Hidden also appeared in Code Unknown, though the two films are only linked thematically as far as I can tell.

Code Unknown is a series of interlocking stories dealing with racial, class and cultural conflicts in modern-day Europe. After seeing the film, there is no doubt that it very obviously resembles this year’s Academy Award-winning abomination Crash. One of these filmmakers surely copied the other and given that Code Unknown was released several years before Crash, I can only come to one conclusion. Crash is a really bad L.A. version of Code Unknown.

The two films offer a marvelous opportunity to compare European and Hollywood styles of filmmaking. While Crash could have been written by an 8th-grade remedial English student, Code Unknown actually respects the intelligence of the audience. While Crash is offensive in its obviousness, Code Unknown makes the audience work. While Crash features stereotypes rather than characters and then dares you not to sympathize with them and/or despise them (nothing about Crash is subtle), Code Unknown creates real characters and puts you in their shoes so that you feel what they feel. This list could go on forever, but you get the idea.

This is not to say that Code Unknown is a perfect film. It’s not. I agree with the NYT reviewer who stated that one of Haneke’s flaws is his tendency to be cryptic. Both Hidden and Code Unknown have endings that leave the audience wondering a bit too much. But compared to Crash, Code Unknown is a masterpiece.

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