DVD Review: Director redeems himself with ‘Code Unknown’

The first film of Austrian director Michael Haneke to be released in the U.S. was the 1997 “Funny Games,” one of the nastiest movies I’ve ever seen. (And that goes double for his 2007 English-language remake with Naomi Watts.)

But when “Code Unknown” (2000) — now out in a clean Blu-ray transfer from Criterion — was released here in 2002, he was largely redeemed. Some of his subsequent movies — which include “Time of the Wolf,” “Cache,” and “Amour” — have been even better.

“Code Unknown” starts with a street incident, presented in a single 8 1/2 -minute shot. A minor scuffle on a busy Paris boulevard introduces us to three characters, whose stories, rarely intersecting, we follow for the rest of film.

Haneke constructs a sort of portrait of “France Today” — with its Anglo citizens, its African immigrants, and its desperate illegals. But he isn’t particularly concerned with slice-of-life realism. There’s more than one element in the story that may be relevant to the title, but in the end, the movie is a puzzle with no obvious solution: The code to the film’s meaning and purpose remains unknown.

Despite some duplication, the material in the supplements is interesting.

First up is a brief introduction that Haneke made in 2001, followed by “In a Foreign Country,” a new, almost half-hour sit-down with the director, in which he discusses the project and shows us script and storyboards. “Filming Haneke” (2000) is a “making of” short (also about half an hour), with interviews with the director, producer Marin Karmitz, and star Juliette Binoche.

Finally, there is a new analysis by scholar Roy Grundmann that is helpful in approaching Haneke’s work.

Code Unknown (Criterion, Blu-ray, $39.95; DVD, $29.95)