71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance

71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance

1994. Austria/Germany. Written and directed by Michael Haneke. With Gabriel Cosmin Urdes, Lucas Miko, Otto Grünmandl. On Christmas Eve, 1993, a nineteen-year-old university student entered a Viennese bank and killed three people before turning the gun on himself. But why should we care? We rationalize away the presence of evil and the pain of others, paraded daily on the evening news, with trite psychological or sociological explanations. Haneke describes this condition in hypnotic and foreboding detail in 71 Fragments, which depicts the random, or fateful, convergence of strangers that day at the bank as a puzzle that will remain unresolved, mysterious, and deeply disturbing. Courtesy Kino Lorber. In German, Romanian; English subtitles. 96 min.