Code Unknown (2000)

Michael Haneke's Paris mosaic is built from unbroken long takes, and the opening one plays like a complete short story. On a busy boulevard a young man tosses the remains of his pastry at a Romanian woman who is begging, another young man objects, and the scuffle ends in an arrest and a deportation. Each of them, along with Juliette Binoche's actress, then gets a strand of their own, and the film keeps cutting away mid-scene, the way a city leaves its strangers half-known. It asks you to make the connections yourself, which is its appeal.