Film
Code Unknown
Code inconnu : Récit incomplet de divers voyages
On a Paris boulevard, a young man throws a bag of rubbish into a beggar's lap. A passer-by intervenes. Everyone involved goes back to their own life — an actress, a photojournalist, a Romanian woman deported and returning, a teacher from Mali — and Haneke follows each of them in single unbroken takes.
About
Michael Haneke's first film made in France, and the first with Juliette Binoche, who brought him the financing after seeing Funny Games. It competed at Cannes in 2000 and took the Ecumenical Jury prize, and it announced the second half of his career: the Austrian provocateur reworked as a chronicler of European cities and the people who cannot quite live in them together.
The film is built from around forty scenes, each shot in a single take and separated by black. A scuffle on the Boulevard Saint-Germain involving a Malian teacher, a Romanian beggar and the son of a farmer connects, loosely, everyone we then follow: Binoche's actress, her war-photographer partner, the deported woman who keeps coming back. Nothing resolves; scenes stop mid-sentence, which is the point.
Haneke's subtitle calls it an incomplete tale of several journeys, and reviewers who wanted a plot found it withholding. What it offers instead is a formal argument about how a city arranges its inhabitants so they never have to finish a conversation, and it has aged into the most prescient of his French films. Watch it before Caché, which is already in the catalogue and which this one makes legible.
Where to Watch
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Streaming availability via JustWatch. Last checked 2026-08-30.
Top Cast
Juliette Binoche
Anne Laurent
Thierry Neuvic
Georges
Josef Bierbichler
Bauer
Alexandre Hamidi
Jean
Maimouna Hélène Diarra
Aminate
Awards, Festivals & Mentions
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Winner — Prize of the Ecumenical Jury — Cannes Film Festival (2000)
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Nominee — Palme d'Or — Cannes Film Festival (2000)
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Cannes Film Festival 2000 — In Competition
