Code 46
Michael Winterbottom

Nathalie Rothschild

Some time in the near future William (Tim Robbins), a married father of one from Seattle, is sent on a 24-hour trip to Shanghai to investigate a case of fraud at the Sphinx insurance company. Having been given an empathy virus, which enables him to read the thoughts of others, it does not take long for William to identify the guilty employee.

Maria (Samantha Morton) has been stealing 'papelles', a form of travel insurance, visa and passport in one, replacing them with fake copies and handing them out to non-citizens.

Code 46, like other sci-fi films, is a story with many layers of meaning, whose basic plot provides a base from which to interweave various dilemmas of our time, including cloning and its potential social and emotional consequences. The film expresses angst about a future when inter-human relations are engineered and the most private of spheres are intervened in.

But Code 46, partly because of a low budget, does not fall squarely within the sci-fi genre. It has also been described as a love story and as a noir thriller (fear, mistrust and paranoia are central to the film). It is also part Greek tragedy as it includes a futuristic version of Oedipal quandary.

In the film, the world has become a global village of high-tech cities with heavily controlled checkpoints, surrounded by desert and shantytowns. A world in which a non-citizen is a non-person and where big brother rules includes Code 46, which stipulates that it is forbidden to have relationships with a person of the same genetic make-up. If a pregnancy occurs in such a case, the memory cluster around it must be erased. Love and human emotions are restricted by the demands of the omnipresent system.

Code 46 is something of an encounter between Lost in Translation and Blade Runner, though in this case forms of travel and architectural and domestic spaces have not changed radically. People travel by cars, rikshaws and airplanes rather than vehicles that hover in midair. In that sense, it depicts a more familiar, contemporary and realistic society than the one concocted in other cult sci-fi movies. The lingua franca is English but with words from Spanish, French, Arabic and other languages mixed in.

In this futuristic vision of a multicultural society where traditional borders have waned, two individuals meet and find a common bond in an environment from which they both feel estranged and the circumstances of that meeting render their temporary relationship both ambiguous and impossible.