Code 46

Back in the late nineties and early aughts my favorite filmmakers tended to be those uncommitted to a signature style, whose range was broad in scope and whose accomplishment was evenly dispersed across a multitude of genres and tones. Alan Parker was an early favorite, Steven Spielberg too. Steven Soderbergh really grabbed my attention early in the 90s with the very stylish Kafka and the slick indie Sex, Lies & Videotape which he followed up with King of the Hill, The Underneath (his remake of Robert Siodmak's Criss Cross) and the losing his movie mind Schizopolis; each picture stylish in different ways and confident at various volumes. 

Rising roughly in tandem to Soderbergh on the other side of the Atlantic English filmmaker Michael Winterbottom wouldn't really arrive on my radar until his Thomas Hardy adaptations Jude and The Claim treated me rough, but memorably, and I started to look for what else he was up to. He followed up The Claim with 24 Hour Party People, the flashy, funny biopic of Tony Wilson and the Manchester music scene's evolution over a fifteen-year period. It was his first feature to star his longest-running collaborator Steve Coogan, but before they took The Trips Winterbottom dropped the near-future sci-fi romantic thriller Code 46 starring Tim Robbins and Samantha Morton. 

And I think it's a low-key masterpiece. 

The story about Robbins' fraud investigator called to Shanghai to find a forger operating inside a large multi-national company producing travel papers for restricted people. He uses an empathy virus to help him intuit things about people and when he meets Morton's forger he is immediately smitten and lies to his clients about the identity of their black marketeer. The pair spend his single night in Shanghai celebrating her birthday and beginning a love affair that has tragic results. 

If you think it sounds like William Gibson writing a Graham Greene story than you and me are in agreement and if that sounds like a heady proposition to you, let me assure you that it is. In fact you can listen to me talk quite a lot about what I enjoy and appreciate about it on this episode of the Projection Booth with Mike White and Dylan Davis. The episode includes interviews with Code 46 screenwriter and frequent Winterbottom collaborator Frank Cottrell-Boyce and producer Andrew Eaton.

Winterbottom has had a long and prolific career, and I've moved on to my crime obsession, so our paths have less-often intersected than I thought they might for a few minutes there in the early aughts. I do really dig his Jim Thompson adaptation The Killer Inside Me and I'd still love to follow Dev Patel's character from The Wedding Guest through a short franchise's worth of adventures and holy hell his producing of the Red Riding Trilogy based on the David Peace novels remains one of the best projects of the 21st century, so I still have an eye on his output, just nothing as intensely as I did after Code 46.

If I were looking to compliment the sci-fi vibes of Code 46, I'd say it's got DNA in common with... Blade Runner, Boarding Gate, Children of Men, Demonlover, Gattaca, Minority Report, New Rose Motel and Until the End of the World. Do with that what you will.