Review from Venice Film Festival: May el-Toukhy’s ‘Woman Unknown’

A World War II movie whose violence is quiet and intimate, May el-Toukhy’s Kvinde ukendt, or Woman Unknown (which was awarded the prestigious Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival), unfolds after Denmark’s liberation from Nazism, positioning it as a unique period drama about a delayed fanatical fuse. In it, a woman’s body becomes the battlefield, owing to suspicions of her past involvement with a Nazi officer. This yields a tale of survival during, and after, wartime, with a focus on winding historical detours that tend towards labels of collaboration, but reveal something much more complex.

The only film by a woman director in this year’s Venice competition, it shoulders the burden of representing a feminine point of view—whether it wants to or not—and it does so in thorny, confrontational ways. Its lush period detail and flowing Danish flags hide an invisible despondency, all focused around protagonist Marie (Venice Best Actress winner Mathilde Arcel), who works as a maid and nanny in an affluent household, but is engaged to marry its owner.

Marie’s betrothed, the much-older Christian (Carsten Bjørnlund), runs a successful glove factory and is none the wiser about her past, which she keeps closely guarded. She cares deeply for Christian’s pre-adolescent daughter, whose late mother she wrestles with replacing—but she’s also still a maid. She still diligently puts on her robes and performs her chores, but when she retires for the evening, she sleeps next to her fiancé. Which is to say: even before Marie is threatened by a past resurgent, she occupies two worlds at once, and exists in the strange and liminal space, as a woman (a poor woman, in particular) doing what she can to survive.

Christian is a stern and distant presence through much of the film, preventing us from ever truly discerning whether Marie loves him (and vice versa) or whether it’s a marriage of convenience. This obfuscation is purposeful; it imbues the film with doubt. Before any determinations can be made about her love life, an old friend from Marie’s hometown, Karl (Thorbjørn Hedegaard), recognizes her, and threatens to expose her transgressions.

As the Danes rightfully celebrate their liberation in the streets, this revelry often veers into the tried and true ritual of humiliating local women suspected of being turncoats, or “Nazi whores,” by chopping off their hair, stripping them naked and painting blood-red swastikas on their skin. Marie witnesses this cruelty firsthand, carried out by men whose bloodlust against their occupiers has now turned towards vulnerable members of their own society. So, when it comes time for Marie to either reckon with her guilt, or pass it off by deflecting the blame, she knows exactly what’s at stake.

This dilemma takes concrete form when the rumors of her past reach Christian’s doorstep, quite literally, in the form of that very same blood-red graffiti, scrawled on the front door of his apartment building, albeit without explanation. This provides Marie with a sliver of plausible deniability, but it leaves her in the precarious position of having to once again survive while potentially bringing harm to someone else.

The stain, although affixed in time and place, symbolically follows her wherever she goes. Although her past entanglements are in her rearview, she’s once more in the position of having to debase herself in order to keep the peace, resulting in some skin-crawling scenes of corrupted intimacy and sexual assault.

Woman Unknown is a harrowing film in which morality and physicality become uncannily entwined, a dynamic el-Toukhy and cinematographer Jasper Spanning gradually explore through visual transformations. Their rigid formalism—born of careful blocking and static framing, often through mirrors—holds secrets at bay, in tandem with Arcel’s withdrawn, calculated self-preservation. However, impressionistic moments occasionally take hold—dissolves, and tilts, and unnervingly quick movements—forcing both the lead performance and the movie’s aesthetic texture to take on a singed quality, as though they’d been silently burned, and need to get away from themselves.

Few films in this year’s Venice competition have had so much to say about how we view history using so few words. What ought to be a moral binary, concerning some of history’s greatest villains, becomes surprisingly nuanced; in fact, you never even see a Nazi on screen, and are forced to reckon with the film’s morality entirely on its own terms.

Even in casual moments, Marie is pushed between men telling her what to do, where to sit, how to look and what to wear (if anything at all), from her husband, to doctors, to men trying to take advantage of her. However, this roster of grievances is tied to the larger context of survival within patriarchal structures, ensuring that Marie’s everyday, material reality comes into constant conflict with the world around her—and thus, with itself—leading to a desperation collecting behind Arcel’s eyes. She delivers a performance of quietly enormous impact, which is especially fitting, for a film that builds slowly and confidently to piercing emotional highs, of the most unexpected kind.

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