Review of 71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance (1995) by Mehmet Y — 10 Mar 2008

This strikes me as Haneke's least successful film. Still, it's more than worthwhile, and I would still nearly call it great. Several different, seemingly random stories are mixed together. We watch vignettes of varying length.

Among them are the stories of a homeless Romanian boy who has illegally crossed into Austria, a lovingly married couple adopting a new foster child, another married couple at odds with each other, an old man starved for attention, and a group of frustrated college students.

We are told at the beginning that one of these students will murder three people at a bank, and we immediately realize that at least some of the other people we have met will be at that bank. I'm not sure how I feel about this technique; I'm certainly a bit conflicted.

And I'm not 100% sure what I'm supposed to get out of this all. I guess it's always worth being reminded of the unpredictability of life and that at any moment we could disappear from this Earth.

Interspersed between the various stories there also appear long clips of the evening news, where various atrocities and tragedies are reported in a manner that desensitizes its audience to them. And the climactic event pops up right alongside them.

Which of course reminds us also that these atrocities happen to real people, a fact that's so easily forgotten when watching the 10 o'clock news. Structurally, the film is brilliant. It is similar to what Altman was doing with Nashville.

Haneke would improve upon this film with Code Unknown, which stands as my favorite of his films and perhaps as my favorite film of the current decade.