Code 46 (2003)

Did u ever watch the sunrise on the New Year's Eve ? When pretty much everybody sleeps, you can see almost no one outside, a light cold wind blows, it's quite quiet around and usually doesn't even snow just to keep the silence. No, it hasn't anything to do with the movie. Well, not directly related ... and probably not for everybody. However, for me it was pretty much the same as feeling.

I wanted to see a SF, and I decided to risk with this despite the rating on IMDb and the description that was more towards romance than SciFi. With the first part it was ok I might say, with the second not so much = it is indeed 90% romance drama and what's SF related is some elements of the context. We are somewhere in a future where the planet is governed by .. something .. called The Sphinx, that among others also dictates the rules of transit on the globe = something like the current visas, only much more hard to obtain, and valid for a much shorter period. And this only for the people in some locations on Earth that still benefit of a living close to what you have today, the rest of the population being outcast on no administration territories where they have to earn their living however they can. There is also a code of laws governing all this organization, which at position 46 specifies that in case of genetic match of at least 25% between a man and a woman they are forbidden to have a child and more generally to have a relationship (well .. the way it is presented in the beginning of a movie is a bit inconsistent for a real law .. but, let's get over it). And, of course, as you probably already figured out, what you'll get in the movie is a definite break of this law.

He and she are both employees of the same global administration that among its activities also does the actual issuing of the transit documents - coverage on the planet - the visas mentioned above. She's a simple worker that has as daily task printing the papers in a .. printing hall let's say .. from Shanghai and also has as secondary income activity the forging of the same papers. He is an investigator from Seattle that has some specific abilities and also benefits from a pretty special technology (I won't spoil what's the most part of the movie charm by disclosing more on that), being sent for 24 hours to Shanghai to discover who's getting out forged visas on the black market. What's going on from here is easily predictable .. like I said the movie is 90% romance. Anyway ...

The story has enough originality (and I didn't disclose all of it above), although you could probably sum it up in a few lines. Generally (with few exceptions) I'm not really fond of scripts centered specifically on romance (and here it's pretty much the case) - I usually classify them either as "depressing" or "boring". For the first the reasons are mainly subjective, but for the second are as objective as they might be = if the romance part is coupled with another genre, or it's done or implied by the story background without being pulled constantly out and served to the viewer on a plate, the effect or the emotion implied can be much more powerful (well .. at least for somebody who can read a bit between the lines here and there). In the current case however we have an exception being neither boring nor depressive (well .. the last part depends of course more of the viewer), despite the fact that the love story eats almost all of the movie time. But .. I think that the way the movie gets out of those two areas depends less on the story you see and more to the way the move it's made. It's the first picture I watched directed by Michael Winterbottom, quite appreciated in the UK as far as I know (and now I know also why). The director of photography is Alvin Kuchler - who I haven't the vague idea who he is but after the movie I've done a quick check and he's the same guy who worked on Danny Boyle's "Sunshine". You can observe some similarities of the image style between the two movies, especially on the beautiful panoramic shots and on the warm color filters. Thing that actually it's on the same line with the sound and gives as result a feeling that's pretty much as a track on a trance chillout album or as sunrise I was mentioning in the beginning.

It's a movie that depends quite a lot also on the mood you are in (and maybe also on the moment you see it, somehow due to a flu based lack of sleep I "managed" to see it exactly between 3:30 and 5:00 AM = ended with a real sunrise). Despite of the general "blue" feel it might suggest and of the story I have to say that I didn't find it depressing but neither on the opposite side. It's sort of a combination between "Lost in Translation" (which was boring) and "Once" (which wasn't boring) with a drop of "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind" ( which was interesting ;) )

Rating: 4 out of 5