These 'incomplete tales of several journeys' make up yet another tapestry film, but one that hangs loose rather than draws the threads together. A Romanian beggar woman squats in the Boulevard St Germain, hands outstretched. A farmer's son, leaving home in crisis, hurls a bundle of paper at her. An outraged immigrant teacher of deaf kids remonstrates. You can't treat people like that - apologise.
Some cops arrive and automatically cart the black teacher off to the cells.
And then Haneke moves onward and outward, exploring his separate characters in the little boxes of their lives. Haneke shoots their scenes with artful, almost documentary restraint - real people, good people caught up in an official degrada tion which degrades us too as we watch. Fragmented souls in a fragmented society, looking for a key to survival, code unknown. Haneke set out to make a movie about immigration and wound up making one about life. It is eloquent and compelling and, in constantly changing episodes, it lives on a cutting edge.