71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance (1994)
(71 Fragmente einer Chronologie des Zufalls)
Country: ÖST/GER
Technical: col 96m
Director: Michael Haneke
Cast: Gabriel Cosmin Urdes, Lukas Miko, Otto Grünmandl
Synopsis:
Vienna, Christmas time: an illegal immigrant child makes his way to the city by truck, a security guard lives out a marriage bounded by silence, the father of a bank teller spends hours on the phone asking to speak to his grandchild again... Soon we begin to realize that all these lives are to be implicated in one dread event, and all the while the newscasters dispense the outcomes of other, far more complex chronologies for our instruction.
Review:
It's been done before and since, of course, not least in the same director's Code Unknown, but the singleness of purpose and concentration of the mise en scène are such that when the holocaust does come we feel somehow cheated (intentionally so) that it is not more graphic or more destructive. Deliberately we are not shown which of the characters, bar one, succumb to the assassin's bullets, and Haneke is perhaps saying that, as with the TV news, we seek to know too much sometimes. That none of the characters is particularly happy makes it all the more poignant.
(71 Fragmente einer Chronologie des Zufalls)
Country: ÖST/GER
Technical: col 96m
Director: Michael Haneke
Cast: Gabriel Cosmin Urdes, Lukas Miko, Otto Grünmandl
Synopsis:
Vienna, Christmas time: an illegal immigrant child makes his way to the city by truck, a security guard lives out a marriage bounded by silence, the father of a bank teller spends hours on the phone asking to speak to his grandchild again... Soon we begin to realize that all these lives are to be implicated in one dread event, and all the while the newscasters dispense the outcomes of other, far more complex chronologies for our instruction.
Review:
It's been done before and since, of course, not least in the same director's Code Unknown, but the singleness of purpose and concentration of the mise en scène are such that when the holocaust does come we feel somehow cheated (intentionally so) that it is not more graphic or more destructive. Deliberately we are not shown which of the characters, bar one, succumb to the assassin's bullets, and Haneke is perhaps saying that, as with the TV news, we seek to know too much sometimes. That none of the characters is particularly happy makes it all the more poignant.
(71 Fragmente einer Chronologie des Zufalls)
Country: ÖST/GER
Technical: col 96m
Director: Michael Haneke
Cast: Gabriel Cosmin Urdes, Lukas Miko, Otto Grünmandl
Synopsis:
Vienna, Christmas time: an illegal immigrant child makes his way to the city by truck, a security guard lives out a marriage bounded by silence, the father of a bank teller spends hours on the phone asking to speak to his grandchild again... Soon we begin to realize that all these lives are to be implicated in one dread event, and all the while the newscasters dispense the outcomes of other, far more complex chronologies for our instruction.
Review:
It's been done before and since, of course, not least in the same director's Code Unknown, but the singleness of purpose and concentration of the mise en scène are such that when the holocaust does come we feel somehow cheated (intentionally so) that it is not more graphic or more destructive. Deliberately we are not shown which of the characters, bar one, succumb to the assassin's bullets, and Haneke is perhaps saying that, as with the TV news, we seek to know too much sometimes. That none of the characters is particularly happy makes it all the more poignant.