Code Unknown

Code Unknown (Code inconnu, 2000) is a French drama by Michael Haneke you can watch online on iFILM, starring Juliette Binoche in a film that treats the entire city of Paris as a failure of communication. Each scene plays out in a single uninterrupted take, then cuts to black.

Everything kicks off in less than a minute: a young man from the provinces drops a piece of trash in the lap of a Romanian woman begging on the street; an African man named Amadou calls him out; the argument draws police; Amadou is arrested; the Romanian woman is deported. That's the trigger. From there Haneke follows five lives that briefly touched in that alley and then diverge — a war photographer off to Kosovo, his actress girlfriend Anne (Binoche) navigating auditions and an empty apartment, a deaf schoolteacher, and the Romanian woman trying to find her way back.

The threads never converge into a resolution. Haneke is not building toward an explanation — he's making the point that living in proximity to people is not the same as understanding them. Uncomfortable, deliberately so, and still sharper than most films about urban life that came after it. Stream Code Unknown (2000) online on iFILM.