There is really only one prevailing subject when it comes female-directed, festival-angled dramas these days. Whether contemporary or historical, that subject is “life is / was miserable for women due to coarse, creepy, entitled and oppressive men who routinely use, abuse, suppress and generally darken their lives.” Movies that say men are thoughtless, oppressive dicks, plain and simple. They do almost nothing but inject fear and anguish into the women concerned, not to mention feelings of entrapment, stagnation, futility.
May el-Toukhy‘s Woman Unknown, a grade-A, carefully wrought, relentlessly grim period drama that won the Venice Film Festival’s Golden Lion trophy last night, is one such film.
It will gloom you out and then some, but is incontestably a class presentation. Five minutes in I was muttering to myself, “Okay, I see…the subdued mood and obvious high-end craft is why it ranks high with the jurors”…very well acted, especially by Mathilde Arcel, who took the Best Actress Volpi Cup at the closing ceremony…authentic mid 1940s atmosphere…nicely shadowed cinematography by Jasper Spanning.
But it’s a male-oppression drama that immediately suggests that there’s no way out of the tunnel. And that just about sums up Woman Unknown. It’s relentlessly grim but then this is life in the big city (i.e., Copenhagen) for Arcel’s Marie, who serves as nanny to the daughter of a 50ish rich guy but is also engaged to the rich guy and fucks him whenever the mood (his) strikes. The complication has to do with Marie’s sexual past with a German soldier, and wanting to keep this history totally buttoned up as Danish resistance guys would publicly humiliate her if this came out. A younger guy, the coldly predatory Karl (Thorbjørn Hedegaard), wants to fuck Marie, and so is threatening to blow the lid off unless she consents, etc.
El-Toukhy’s aim is to draw you into Marie’s world, and that means constant sexual predation and subjugation and even, in one of the grossest scenes of physical intimacy in movie history, the swallowing of a huge gob of male spit (i.e., the guy being the coldly predatory Karl, played by Thorbjørn Hedegaard). There’s no way out of this, no lucky escape, no sudden dramatic solution…Marie is stuck and so are we. The grimness is what it is.
Alas, Woman Unknown screws up toward the end when it ignores a signal to wrap things up. I was saying to myself “this really needs to end now but El-Toukhy is determined to keep it going a while longer. And then a while more. This is a mistake…a narrative that’s leaving us hanging.”