Code 46 [2003]

Just as war was once deemed too important to be left to the generals, now the future is too important to be left to science fiction writers and filmmakers. Screenwriter Frank Cottrell Boyce describes himself as 'a bit of a sci-fi buff', which is telling since no s-f buff would use the term 'sci-fi', and Code 46 suffers to some extent from that reinventing-the-wheel malaise that strikes down the likes of Margaret Atwood or P.D. James when they rehash established s-f ideas but whinge that they're doing something more important than categorised throwaway and shouldn't have to bear the science fiction mark of cain.

Film forces more rigour than literature, since spadework that can be dodged by a writer has to be done so a future world can be shown through found locations, set design and tiny gimmicks like advanced but not incredible computer screens or tiny passport-personal organiser gadgets. Finding spectacular but underfilmed cities and anonymous cutting edge spaces like airports and hotels, in an approach that dates back to Alphaville but most recently used by Abel Ferrara for New Rose Hotel, Code 46 creates a globalised future of blurred ethnicities [just run down the names of the cast list] and a have / have not dualism based not on nations but on cities and wildernesses [aspirants want to be 'covered'] which always feels convincing. The trouble is that all this background can still just lie there if the up-front story is as flatly uninvolving as the rote love affair between bland investigator and pixie-ish outlaw that takes the strain here. Late in the day, the possibility is raised that William's love for Maria is a side-effect of the empathy virus he has been using professionally, but it's clear that we're not supposed to believe this. The issue of whether its unsuspected genetic kinship sparks a romance which can survive several mindwipes and responsibility for the death of an innocent bat-lover ought to be important but somehow isn't. In the end, the characters fall for each other because that's how insurance investigators and femmes fatales act in 1940s movies, though Tim Robbins and Samantha Morton try hard to individuate the blanks they are given to play. Morton, still shorn and semi-psychic from Minority Report, narrates and struggles to stay alive in the trap of plot and editorial, while Robbins acts as if his character has already had his mind reconstructed so many times that his default identity is blurred. Like many things in the film, the premise throws up a possible reading but nothing on screen prompts an exploration of it.

An imagined near-future is always a mix of genuine extrapolation with satire on present-day trends, and Michael Winterbottom's vision here grows organically from the topical concerns of his In the World. The most credible, convincing and telling aspects of Code 46 concern a society where travel and residency are completely governed by the possession of identity and permission papers. Many future satires are based on the notion of one particular trend running rampant so that it rules the world [advertising, in Pohl and Kornbluth's The Space Merchants]; here, without quite stating it, the big villain is the Insurance Industry. A nice irony is that the one real victim we meet dies when he gets round the system, because just this once its decision was not arbitrary but apparently no one ever told him there was a good reason why he was refused permission to travel to India. Less successful is the muddy business about genetics that gives the film its title [which has to be explained in a lengthy caption]. We have to accept this on two levels, as reproductive cloning and other vaguely-defined genetic engineering processes are at once everyday enough to be an accepted fact but still potentially shocking enough for the relationship between William and Maria to have an oedipal, transgressive edge. Code 46 is so quietly intense that its vital scramble of backstory, which involves an untidy genetic farce involving a batch of clones and donor insemination and is never satisfactorily explained, tumbles out as an add-on which could be a central concern but is in fact barely explored.
KIM NEWMAN

First Published In: Sight & Sound October 2004

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