Code 46 is written by Frank Cottrell Boyce and directed by Michael Winterbottom. In the film Code 46, Tim Robbins falls in love with Samantha Morton, a girl he shouldn’t go near. It is a futuristic and intelligent movie by the always unpredictable Michael Winterbottom. Winterbottom’s last movie was the sexually explicit 9 Songs. This one, made before that, is demure by comparison: the one early sex scene is artily filmed in close-up and is not especially erotic, partly because the couple is so odd, by intention.
Robbins is about half a metre taller than Morton, but that’s not obvious in most scenes. The mismatch is more that we can’t see how he is capable of the unbridled desire that seems to grip him. He’s so straight and tight, so out of his comfort zone, you wonder he could act on his attraction for this young, anarchic girl. There’s a reason for his reticence, but he doesn’t understand it, nor his compulsion towards her. It’s not revealed until much later, just in time to rescue the picture. The chemistry between Robbins and Morton is problematic up to this point - not exactly white hot, not entirely cool. Something draws them together and keeps them apart. When we find out what, it’s a shock, but it makes the movie much more intriguing and mysterious. An unsatisfying romance becomes a dramatic one. Most romances make you hope that girl and boy will get together. They’re often boring like that. Code 46 makes you hope they won’t, which is at least a novel approach.
The love story is eventually powerfully emotional. Meanwhile, the meat is in the film’s ideas about the future. Shanghai is surrounded by desert; people work at night rather than expose themselves to the sun’s rays; they speak in a mix of languages, as in: ’’Ni hao, compadre. Let’s eat.’’ William arrives on a 24-hour assignment from his Seattle-based detective agency, a set-up straight from James M. Cain, but this world owes a lot to the novels of Philip K. Dick too (the writer, Frank Cottrell Boyce, is a sci-fi aficionado). The city is enclosed. No one travels unless they have the right ’’papelle’’ (papers in Spanish). To get the papers, you have to have the right insurance. ’’Cover’’ is thus a black-market commodity and William has been called to a big company to find out who is stealing covers. He is clairvoyant, courtesy of an ’’empathy virus’’.
He quickly identifies Maria (Morton) as the culprit. She is coquettish and sassy, but lonely, not unlike roles that Morton has played well before. The day they meet is Maria’s birthday and she needs distracting - she has a morbid fear of her future. Instead of handing her in, William follows her into the teeming nightscape of Shanghai. The film is not constructed on futuristic sets but around existing places that look like the future, such as Shanghai, Dubai and parts of Hong Kong. Winterbottom uses contemporary architecture to suggest two worlds: the poor may not even enter the mega-cities. People live ’’inside’’ or ’’outside’’ the zones of regulation. They have more freedom outside and fewer comforts.
Winterbottom has an uncanny ability to create beautiful, hypnotic sequences, using contemporary music. His films have a seductive modernism, but without losing focus on character and idea. Other directors raised on MTV use music to paper the cracks; Winterbottom uses it to get inside the cracks. He is one of the most intelligent and original British directors at work today.
Code 46 is not completely engrossing as a romance, but is fascinating as a scary proposition of things to come.