William (Tim Robbins) is an investigator sent to Shanghai to look into who has been supplying fake papeles to those who cannot properly get a cover. There, he meets Maria (Samantha Morton) and the day which he questions her just happens to be her birthday.
For some reason that William can never quite put his finger on, he decides not to tell the company that Maria is the person defrauding them. Instead, he lies and says it is another employee. Aftwards, he follows Maria who eventually goes to dinner and then a club with him, before ending up back at her apartment where they make love.
Job complete, William goes home. But then, the man whom Maria had gotten the illegal cover for dies and the powers that be send William bak to Shanghai to clean up his mess. Instead he makes it worse and along the way discovers that Maria is genetically identical to his mother, something which he doesn't tell her. They make love again, but this time she has been given a virus to sotp her from saxing it up with her son, so the solution is to tie her hands to the bed frame so that she can't stop William.
After a car accident while they are trying to flea authorities, Maria and William are captured. She is exiled to the outside and he has his memory of her and the case in Shanghai wiped.
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Take a smidge of Blade Runner, add a pinch of Johhny Mnemonic and a splash of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind to your main ingrediant of Oedipus and you get Code 46.
Maria narrates the movie, so you get some idea of why she does what she does, but a lot of William's decisions elicit a "whu?" and even one "what the fuck?" I never get his motivation. I don't blame Robbins though, he did a fine job as always. I blame the writer and director. It is perfectly allowable for characters to be mysterious or to be conundrums, even to themselves. But, what isn't acceptable is not giving us anything. Does William do this on every investigation? Is he drawn to Maria because of her genes? Does he care about his wife and son? Does he care about his job.
The movie has an interesting premise and I appreciate that they didn't want to make this film into an action-adventure sci-fi film. I would have liked to have known more about the context in which Code 46 was first implemented and if it's still relavant. Our people no longer able to conceive children naturally?
This film was missing something for me. I liked Maria, but I guess I needed William to be more emotionally involved for me to be involved with him (which is ironic since he was dosed with an empathy virus), or he could have gone the opposite route. Something.
The other thing which really kills this movie for me, is the gratuitous nudity. When William and Marie make love the first time and at the end of the movie when William and his wife make love, there is no nudity and these scenes work. But the second time WIlliam and Marie make love, well you can't really call it that, but it's not exactly rape, either - I should explain: Marie wants to make love to William (and he to her), but she has been given a virus to make her flee from his romantic touches, so she has him tie her to the bed and then fights him through the whole act while she still wants to have sex. Complicated. The nudity comes just after William has bound her hands and taken off her pants. The camera slowly pans up her legs and stops on the money shot. This is before he mounts her and nothing of her exposed parts are shown during the act. I have to question why this was done. It didn't lend to the story. I could imagine that if there had been a scene where Marie is fighting William as he is pulling off her pants that results in nudity, while not necessary wouldn't be incongruous with the story. Maybe scenes were cut that explain this, but I doubt it. It left me feeling kind of ucky - not from the whole Oedipus deal or her mind wanting one thing even though her body was programmed to fight it. Those are integral parts of the story. But this scene is not. It leaves me feeling like the director is a perve and so am I for watching the movie.
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