People do things all the time that don’t make any sense. This is one of the key ideas put across in 71 Fragments Of A Chronology Of Chance. Also that most other films, particularly in Hollywood, are full of characters whose motivations and actions always make sense and only serve the purpose of the individual’s role in the story. Michael Haneke wanted to play with this convention by creating a series of scenes involving characters where we don’t know a great deal about them and not everything that happens can be attributed to a specific role.
The film opens with text explaining how a young man killed a number of people in a bank one morning seemingly at random. It then pans back a few months and, as the title suggests, proceeds to play out random unrelated fragments of the lives of several characters leading up to the event interspersed with real news footage taken from the time.
Haneke has a knack for the realistic. His unbridled detail of the mundane is not only compulsively hypnotic, but serves purpose to build a rapport with characters and only make the often shocking events of his films all the more unforgettable. It’s with this in mind that I say that 71 Fragments is his worst film out of the ones I’ve seen. The ideas behind it create an interesting point of discussion, but on screen, the constant shifting between seven or more different characters just makes for an uninteresting highlight real. The only character whose story is really worth following is that of a Romanian boy who illegally immigrated to Austria and his living alone on the streets. The rest of the film darts back and forth too often between characters and locations for any real connection to be felt with the audience. The result of which is mostly confusing, and often boring.
2/5
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