OS PERIGOS DO ACASOEm 71 Fragmentos de uma Cronologia do Acaso (1994), o desfecho é antecipado logo no começo. Um letreiro informa que na véspera de Natal um jovem de 19 anos matará três pessoas em um banco de Viena e depois cometerá o suicídio. A partir daí, o que se segue são imagens desconexas da vida cotidiana de várias pessoas. Rapidamente, entende-se que o destino daqueles indivíduos se encontrará com a tragédia final. A questão que nos envolve e prende ao filme, o terceiro de Michael Haneke, é: como isso vai acontecer?
O formato é semelhante ao que o diretor usaria mais tarde em Código Desconhecido (2000). Entre os que surgem aqui como protagonistas, estão um garoto romeno que fugiu de casa e perambula sozinho pelas ruas da cidade, um casal que enfrenta dificuldades de relacionamento com a criança recém-adotada, um velhote solitário que gasta seu tempo falando pelo telefone, pais aflitos com a doença do filho e um jovem estudante que treina ping-pong e revela um comportamento agressivo quando perde apostas para amigos.
A vida dessas pessoas não é contada a partir de grandes eventos, mas sim em uma exploração crua das mais corriqueiras ações. Haneke foi, de certa forma, muito sensível ao traçar nos detalhes um retrato humano e intimista. Se a intenção com a adoção do formato fragmentado era distanciar o espectador dos personagens, pequenos momentos fazem o contrário, de tão realistas que nos parecem. Falamos, por exemplo, da rápida troca de olhares do garoto que acabar de tirar comida do lixo com uma pessoa dentro de um carro na rua; ou do senhor que, ao acordar, ajoelha-se e pede a Deus que não seja vítima de nenhuma guerra ou ataque nuclear.
Aos picotes do cotidiano, acrescentam-se imagens jornalísticas que noticiam a violência em várias partes do mundo. E aí encontramos a crítica social, elemento indispensável em um título hanekiano. Aqui, abre-se espaço a inúmeras interpretações. Podemos falar de espetacularização da violência ou de um paralelo entre a brutalidade da guerra e a agressividade sistemática no meio urbano. Não importa. O que sentimos é que Haneke não fala de seres fictícios em um universo imaginado. Fala do que é real e concreto, do que conhecemos bem, mas muitas vezes não pensamos a respeito.
Partindo de uma olhada sem atenção, poderíamos entender que a coleta dos fragmentos apenas justifica o desfecho. Falaríamos, portanto, de uma obra frívola, uma vez que o final já é sabido por todos desde o primeiro instante, e que a vida dos personagens não apresenta nada de muito interessante. Tudo isso é verdade, mas o valor da produção está exatamente aí. Haneke fala do acaso, da forma mais inimaginável como duas ou mais vidas podem se encontrar. Faz-nos pensar que o acaso faz vítimas e que ninguém está imune a ele. Talvez seja muito pior do que qualquer guerra. Quem vai saber?
Pedro Garcia
Michael Haneke’s third feature film, 71 Fragments Of A Chronology of Chance expands on the claustrophobically enclosed subject matter of his earlier films, The Seventh Continent (1989) and Benny’s Video (1992), which looked at various problems in society from the viewpoint of the middle-class family. The focus remains on those disenchanted by bourgeois morality, hypocrisy and the absurdities of modern society, but the scope here is extended to examine this point of view from a fractured cross-section of different viewpoints, all of them united by a moment of shocking and senseless violence.
That moment of violence – and it’s almost a given in any Michael Haneke film – is a fictional recounting of the killing of three people in a bank on December 23rd 1993 by a 19 year-old student, who subsequently shoots himself in the head. This information is presented to the viewer in the opening screen of the film and the 71 fragmentary scenes that follow show a number of seemingly unconnected people and events over five separate days from the 12th October to up to the events of December 23rd, where their paths intersect.
The people who come into view over the course of the film are from a variety of backgrounds and ages. One is a young Romanian immigrant who has smuggled himself illegally into Austria, where he finds himself trying to survive on the streets of Vienna. We see a childless married couple and their attempts to adopt or foster a child. We also see an old man who lives alone and witness his relationship with his daughter who works in a bank. One of the threads follows the banal, everyday routine of the security man who transports money between banks and his drab existence with his wife. More relevant to the events we know take place at the end of the film, we see a young man break-in to an army barracks and rob the armoury and we also follow the progress of the young 19 year old student, a table tennis player who is increasingly agitated by events around him, who through an intermediary buys one of the stolen guns.
Like Haneke’s later film, Code Unknown – which is more or less a remake of this film, tackling similar themes using the same techniques – each of the scenes in 71 Fragments Of A Chronology of Chance is isolated and presented out of context, separated by black screens and seeming to have no relationship or even narrative flow in each of the threads. Some scenes appear meaningful while others seem random and irrelevant – such as a three-minute single take of the young student relentlessly returning the serve of a machine that automatically fires out table tennis balls, or a static nine-minute shot of the old man carrying out an insignificant one-way conversation with his daughter over the telephone. Other scenes, also like Code Unknown, show random scenes of sudden unexpected violence – a minor outburst of anger or an off-screen suicide.
Through this technique Haneke tries to reflect the rhythms of everyday life, which does not conform to easy identifiable narrative threads that operate to clear cause and effect. Any one of these events could be significant in the understanding of subsequent actions, or they could have no bearing on them at all. When it comes to understanding the motivations of individuals, Haneke believes that it is impossible or at least misleading to present characters as readable, easily defined machines who react a certain way under certain stimuli – rather their reactions can often be complex and contradictory. Like Haneke’s two previous feature films this is a deliberate technique that is designed to present events impassively and leave the viewer room to make their own decisions, but here through a number of random and not so random scenes he takes the technique much further and would refine it further still with Code Unknown being completely made up of single-take scenes, the director refusing to even allow editing and montage to impinge on his cinematic model of reality.
How successful this technique is in 71 Fragments Of A Chronology of Chance is consequently heavily dependent on how much significance the viewer is willing to impart to each scene. The unedited shot of the young man playing table-tennis for example could be read in many ways – reflecting the monotony of the routine of his life, his mechanical response to stimulus, a working-out of his frustration or anger, or any number of interpretations, all of which could be psychologically meaningful in any attempt to understand his later actions in the bank. On the other hand, taken at face value, it is one long, boring, meaningless scene. The same criteria could be applied to each scene in the film or to the film as a whole and, by the director’s own admission, either view could be valid.
Yet there are clearly strong points made, such as the hypocrisy of a society that will look favourably on a young Romanian orphan simply because a television station has taken up his cause, yet not apply the same charity to other, grown-up illegal immigrants. And, like Haneke’s two earlier films, TV is clearly singled out for heavy criticism, each of the five days shown in the film starting with a news bulletin of the days’ significant world events – from the war in Bosnia, to the violence in Northern Ireland and the long-running saga of Michael Jackson. The events of 23rd of December significantly features a bulletin at the start and the end of the day, into which the totality and complexity of the lives lost in the bank killing slips like just one other event to be momentarily puzzled over and then forgotten about.
daqui
(extracto)
Título Original: 71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance
Realização: Michael Haneke
Argumento: Michael Haneke
Interpretação: Gabriel Cosmin Urdes, Lukas Miko, Otto Grünmandl, Anne Bennent, Udo Samel,
Branko Samarovski, Claudia Martini, Georg Friedrich, Klaus Händl
Direcção de Fotografia: Christian Berger
Montagem: Marie Homolkova
Origem: Áustria
Ano de Estreia: 1994
Duração: 96’
Legendas. inglês
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