Michael Haneke’s death-of-the-soul-of-Europe project soldiers on with 1994’s 71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance, the final entry in his so-called “trilogy of emotional glacification.” After x-raying the intestines of the family unit in The Seventh Continent and Benny’s Video, the filmmaker was ready to go global—that is, by bringing various other sides of the planet to the miserabilist equation via the trope of the video image that defaces reality.
Though Bosnia, Somalia, and Ireland are some of the countries whose upheavals are glimpsed through the filter of TV news, Haneke grounds the action in Vienna, where, we’re told at the start, an athletic young jock (Lukas Miko) will shoot bystanders in a bank before turning the gun on himself. Lest anybody think Haneke is going only for Why Does Herr Ping-Pong Man Run Amok?, the narrative soon expands to include such strands as a homeless Romanian boy (Gabriel Cosmin Urdes) eating out of garbage cans, a couple (Anne Bennent and Udo Samel) that tries to adopt a young girl (Corina Eder) and later take in the homeless boy, and an old man (Otto Grünmandl) all but abandoned by his daughter (Patricia Hirschbichler) to the chatter of television—a mosaic (or origami puzzle, if you prefer) of modern urban alienation, denied community even in its suffering by Haneke’s isolating framing and blackout edits.
Just as Benny’s Video lays the ground for Caché, 71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance anticipates Code Unknown in its interlocking character snippets, and, while both films’ formats owe much to Short Cuts, Haneke’s wintry vision lacks Robert Altman’s sense of life overflowing beyond the frame. The immaculate technique could rival Robert Bresson’s circa L’Argent, yet Haneke’s churlish grip over the characters’ already wretched lives is nothing short of inhuman, to say nothing of reductive; the tragedy of life, if life could be so labeled, lies in the many contradictory impulses (warmth and cruelty, humor and pain, beauty and horror) that give it a fullness that eludes the filmmaker’s relentless misanthropy. Haneke’s alarm at the injustices of the world is matched only by his own emotional sadism, as he’s already killed his characters long before he’s sent them to their senseless rendezvous.
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