12. 71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance (1994)
An early, and relatively minor, Haneke showing 71 “fragments” – or glimpses of apparently unrelated scenes and people – set in present-day Vienna. These involve a security guard, a troubled young man, a depressed retiree and a Romanian illegal immigrant. So what’s tying them all together? The answer is partially given at the beginning and fully at the end, and the movie gives us Haneke’s keynote themes: the nature of violence, urban alienation, the abolition of compassion and community in capitalism and western hypocrisy in primly looking away from injustice and desolation in other parts of the world. But the backstory twist ending – similar to the one Krzysztof Kieślowski in effect gave us the same year in Three Colours Red – is a bit pat.
