Code Unknown is like a parody of an art-house film. It reminded me why I very seldom choose to spend an evening down at the Renoir cinema, in central London, with people who give movies of this sort a great deal more rope than they should. Their belief that proper cinema is about something other than mere entertainment gives art-house directors carte blanche to turn out self-indulgent, turgid rubbish, in the knowledge that their audience would rather die than let on that they spent half the movie thinking about what they were having for dinner. Because of this, they are a much easier group to please than the plebs in the multiplexes. Mr Average will have no truck with a film that doesn't grab him by the balls - a problematic attitude, sure, but one that at least establishes a clear criterion - whereas Mr Renoir, having no expectation of being either delighted or transported, will read his lack of enjoyment as proof that the film is working on a cerebral level.
This is his chief mistake. It's an easy one to make, because directors of this kind of film are always talking about the importance of "distancing" the audience and disengaging its emotions to enable it to enter a productive political dialogue with the "text". Code Unknown's director, Michael Haneke, has talked about this strategy, saying that he wants to keep his audience "on the outside of what is happening". He certainly achieves this objective. I was so detached from the action in his film that, the first time I watched it, I fell asleep halfway through. What does this say about the film's intellectual credentials? If Haneke says that he is prepared to sacrifice the visceral involvement of his audience to create a situation in which they can "see more clearly", is it possible to judge his work on the shallow grounds of whether or not it keeps you on the edge of your seat? Many of the techniques he uses - filming scenes in real time, keeping cameras still when the action has moved beyond the frame of the original shot - are designed to make you think about the ways other films have kept your interest at the expense of artistic truth.
This is a valid concern, but a better film-maker than Haneke would have done more than just shove this stuff in front of us. The challenge for directors aspiring to make clever films is to do something with their ideas, instead of presuming that a fragmentary, non-linear narrative - never mind what it consists of - is enough to secure their credentials as artists. When they succeed, the films they make are anything but dull. Innovation in more difficult genres has the same effect as well-executed plot twists in a Hollywood blockbuster. It makes you sit up and take notice. When this happens, you know that you are watching a clever film. If it doesn't, you know that it isn't. No amount of art-house conceits can protect a director from the poverty of his own imagination. If he handles his material badly, his film will bore us: if he handles it well, we will stay interested, however hard the ideas he is dealing with. It is important to say this, I think, because people so often make the mistake of thinking that they are to blame if they get bored in an art-house cinema. They think it's because they are stupid, when really their reaction suggests that the director has made a dumb picture.
I myself was caught this way with Code Unknown. It looks terribly clever because every scene is a small, suggestive fragment that mirrors, Haneke says, "the incomplete nature of our perception". Incompleteness is a big thing with him. While other directors spend their time and energy working towards coherence, he likes to leave everything dangling, the better to show that less worthy art than his is a facile manipulation of the truth. Thus the fragments end in the middle of conversations, or wrap themselves up at the point where you would expect something to illuminate what is going on. Their cumulative effect is to build a picture, rather than the story, of the journeys - both literal and metaphorical - of several different characters: a Kosovar woman who leaves her home to come and beg in Paris; an actress (Juliette Binoche) on the threshold of a film career who is trying to save her relationship with her war photographer boyfriend; a young boy on the run from his rural home; and a black music teacher who runs into trouble with the French police.
The theme that unites these stories is access. Lacking the code to reach each other's hearts, Binoche and her boyfriend are locked in mutual misunderstanding. On another level, the Kosovar woman's inability to access her host society condemns her to the periphery. She remains excluded, while the untranslated signing of deaf/mute children in the black musician's class gives us a clue as to what that feels like. Blah blah blah. You see, I do get it. But while earnest political themes may signify quality, they do not guarantee it.
The problem with Haneke's heavy hand and ponderous art-house manner is that they make us lose interest in some of his more engaging ideas. The risk of alienating your audience, if you are not Brecht, is that it will look at your treatment of exclusion and other hot political topics and simply say: "So what?"
Code Unknown (15) opens at the Renoir, Brunswick Square, London WC1 (020 7837 8402), on 25 May
