Film

User reviews of this film

• Less Deceived said...

  Posted on Jun 04 2009 19:47 Disappointing. The film shows moments of promise, but Haneke has no respect for his audience. I suspect that he is full of post-modern bullshit and therefore has lost all sense of the value of narrative. Thus, in the scene in the subway which the Time-Out critic and the others above all praise, (Scenes here like Binoche being terrorised on the Métro while other passengers pretend not to notice are spinechillingly authentic) Haneke leaves in the end of the take where Binoche is obviously laughing. Any other director would have edited that detail out, but Haneke thinks it is clever to leave it in. It ruins the effect of the scene and dissipates the tension of the racist attack on the white woman. That kind of film-making, where the audience are treated as morons, seems arrogant to me. It is a pity, because there are scraps of narrative which work well and the actors are trying to create something meaningful.

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• Technoguy said...

  Posted on Sep 15 2008 18:20 Haneke has crafted a fragmented masterpiece.He does this to eschew morality
  and moralising.A pebble of disaffection is thrown into the pond of modern city
  life and he charts the ripples in several lives. He chops and changes between the
  different lives in scenes often of one take, cutting after it’s started and before it’s
  finished.He doesn’t allow you to develop normal empathy for one or two
  characters,he shows you the inter-relatedness of all the characters. Also he
  keeps it real,even deluding you you are watching a real scene only to discover
  it’s a rehearsal or it’s a film within this film or a scene from a film that
  Anne(Binoche) is acting in.And was that child crawling on the balcony rail
  a real child in a real scene or only acting? Haneke takes his bourgeois
  audience out of their comfort zones of cause and consequence,story and
  narrative. He makes his audience do the real work to detect the missing links
  and discover the code unknown and project their own feelings onto this
  mosaic of interconnections and misunderstandings.He opens up the narrow
  bourgeoise world of European cinema so that characters from Romania,Mali
  Kosovo and France are together through the thought-experiment of film.
  Things take place in real time like the opening long take along the boulevard
  drawing all the characters in the subject together,or the very real scary scene
  shot on the subway where Anne is taunted and insulted by Arab youths,or
  the excellent supermarket shopping scene with Anne and Georges. Her
  frightening audition scene where she is trapped and appeals directly to the camera.
  As in this the film seems to say the multiethnic nature of modern life means
  we are all trapped behind ethnicity,class,wealth/poverty,bigotry,position
  searching out a common thread of courtesy, thinking before we speak
  unless we become paralyzed by fear,loneliness and isolation.

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• usman khawaja said...

  Posted on May 22 2008 13:16 hooray for mr.hanekes brilliant code

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• usman khawaja said...

  Posted on May 22 2008 13:15 code broken on hanekes cinematic brilliance and social bigotry-haneke always works in triads or so i perceeive,here we are introduced directly to the concept of communication or the rather lack of it in the form of a class of deaf -mute kids trying to reach out to each other,but then it assumes a dramatic parody in an intelligent mode on the contemporary european culture of melting pots ,what we see are real people like us -familiar themes though ugly and unwanted but happenning in our sight and hearing,juxtaposed on images of media from kosovo and kabul.this then becomes both a mockery of human values as they are in their unjust,poetic licence as well as a satire on race and behaviour.
  the central scene is played as hamidi-a french white youth tosses waste paper into the lap of a romanian beggar, amadou-a muslim youth from mali[an african music teacher]chides and confronts him-with binoche intervening to stop the fight ,the travesty ensues as law arrives and arrests the beggar woman and the african moralist who wants hamidi to apologise to the beggar woman .
  this then gives mr.haneke a solid reason to divulge into the lives of the chic actress ,the muslim black youth and the romanian woman .
  we see the cesspool modern europe has become with broken human rights strewn all over where victims become agressors and perpetrators win in public .
  neuvic is binoch's boyfriend ,their real -life argument in a super-market is a delight to watch ,binoche being harassed on the metro by a disgruntled white hating arab boy is horrific with no one but a middle aged arab man intervening ,
  neuvic covering his story in kosovo and kabul become more expansive to take us into the conflict zones of human massacres.
  but the victory belongs to haneke as he brings about the amalgamation of multiple cultures ,behaviours and prejudices in a moral story which explores whether justice is still an honorourable code in our social milieu .
  unfortunately for all of us except the totally naive the answer is unkown as mentioned in the title.
  the music with the martial drumming ,the walk on boulevard st.germain and the metro ride are captured by the camera in the most creatively captivating manner possible and the tale of mis-communication and social bigotry in today's tenchnically enlightened and human right concious society becomes a masterwork on present day human behaviour in everyday life .
  a code you all need to explore to divulge into your own truth -haneke is indeed a wise man or even a genius .
  usman khawaja
  - jbz7879

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