Michael Haneke (Bavaria, Germany, 1942) is a singer of outrages. Both individual and collective. Of racial, migratory, gender, socio-cultural and political abuses. His cinema is a tribute to the dark side of life, to the one that we constantly avoid witnessing because of what it can touch us, because of what we would not want to see, to avoid that damn guilt complex that, as passive beings, we must digest as a nutritious ingredient. without looking at its consequences.
All its purposes, shots, characters and cinematography are a magnificent opportunity to present us with vulnerable and vulnerable beings, victims of our own lack of definition and incapable of putting into practice those blows that we strike ourselves in the chest, believing ourselves to be brave, fair and tolerant.
You have no preference to include the traumatic experiences of children, adolescents, youth, or the elderly in your stories. On the contrary, as a spectator of human tragedy, Haneke knows how to expose the individual den of evil that hurts us the most. In “Benny’s video” he portrayed the ghost of a heartless young man who does not even believe in his parents. In “La pianista” he got into the psychology of a frustrated sexual woman and in “Caché” he reproduced the resentment and conscience of the higher social classes in the face of a dark past.
If “Funny games” brought the discourse of the humiliation of others as a game for the destruction of life (the hatred of a youth who is denied an important social space), in “Unknown Code” the outrage takes on many forms more varied and complex such as immigration, racism, lack of identity and social uprooting.
Data sheet
Year: 2000. Duration: 107 min. Country France. Direction and script: Michael Haneke. Cast: Juliette Binoche, Thierry Neuvic, Josef Bierbichler, Ona Lu Yenke, Luminita Gheorghiu, Arsinée Khanjian, Alexandre Hamidi, Helene Diarra
Synopsis: On a busy boulevard in Paris, a young man throws a crumpled paper into the outstretched hands of a beggar woman. This event is the pretext to unite a group of very dissimilar characters but who have in common being humiliated, by different means or events, from their respective social positions.
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