Rent 71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance (1994)

Not one to be watched for pleasure. - 71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance review by JD

Of the almost random scenes, some of which finish in mid-sentence, some feature a man practising table-tennis, most are pretty dull. Some of the clips of news presentations are pretty grim (most notably the rotting corpses in the Yugoslavian ethnic cleansing era). The excerpts are of the lives of several characters most of whom are either dull or unpleasant. These people are all in one place at one time at the end of the film. As a narrative or story or piece of entertainment it is poor. As an alternative way of directing a film it is outstanding. If you want an arty experience get this one. You will remember it for a while.

The Wallpaper and the Gun - 71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance review by griggs

Haneke closes his emotional glaciation trilogy with something that feels less like a film and more like an evidence board. 71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance cuts between fictional vignettes — a Romanian refugee boy, a lonely pensioner, a student who seems completely fine, thanks for asking — and real TV news broadcasts from late 1993. Yugoslavia. Michael Jackson. Media noise as historical wallpaper. The effect is disorienting: the world outside the frame is just as fragmentary and senseless as anything inside it.

The structure is the argument. Seventy-one scenes, each banal and inconclusive, all converging on a bank in Vienna at Christmas. It’s loosely rooted in a real event, though Haneke refuses to tidy it up. He withholds the clean moral inventory: who matters, how these lives connect, what any of it adds up to. That ambiguity is the point.

Cold, controlled, occasionally brilliant. Probably the hardest to love on first watch of Haneke’s early work, but the pieces linger. The fragments keep reassembling themselves in your head, uninvited.