NYFF - The Unknown Girl
Tuesday, September 27, 2016 at 7:30PM Here's Manuel reporting from the New York Film Festival with the latest from the Dardenne brothers.
The nameless girl at the center of the Dardenne brothers’ latest film is a black girl who, one Friday night near an expressway in Seraing, Belgium, rings the buzzer of a medical clinic. Doctor Jenny Davin (Adèle Haenel) is both too tired to see yet another patient and too riled up from a disagreement with her intern Julien (Olivier Bonnaud) to let either of them respond to see why anyone would be buzzing at such a late hour. Neither thinks twice of it. “If it’d been an emergency they’d have rung twice,” she rationalizes. But the next day a police officer informs Dr. Davin that the girl has been found dead not too far from the clinic with no ID on her—her image on the clinic’s surveillance system the only clue they have to figure out what may have happened with her...
Shocked by this discovery and rattled by her own guilt-ridden view of the previous night’s events, Dr. Davin sets out to find out who the “unknown girl” was. This means forgoing the fancy private practice job she’d already accepted and working more closely with the neighborhood surrounding the clinic which includes a large immigrant and working class population. Every visit and every house call she makes is tinged with the urgency of needing to atone for what she sees as a failure as a devoted public servant—early on we see her leaving the celebratory drinks to visit a cancer patient at home who merely wanted to serenade her with a goodbye song.
Little by little, Dr. Davin begins piecing together certain events from that fateful Friday night, uncovering both the girl’s identity as well as what may have caused her death. Throughout, I kept imagining how straightforward this narrative would be in a Hollywood film. It could so easily be a thriller with an everywoman being thrown into a murder mystery that’s way out of her league, with her stamina and strength prevailing given her kind heart and righteous purpose. Thankfully (and quite obviously), the Dardennes don’t come close to that dullness though there is a keener sense of narrative propulsion that in, say, Two Days One Night.
Instead, what they’ve crafted—with a knockout and necessarily understated performance by Haenel—is a thrilling whodunnit threaded through a series of vignettes that empathetically probe the social commentary that the filmmaking duo so excel at, flagging issues of immigration, prejudice, healthcare, and sex work that never feels didactic nor condescending to their characters (or audiences, really). The mystery may be solved by the film's end but there's little here to suggest that such a tidy denouement solves or even gives closure to the many larger concerns the film raises.
Reader Comments (2)
Dardenne Brothers put my ass in the seat!!!!!!
In a perfect world Adèle Haenel would be in contention for a best actress nod. It was a better performance than Huppert in Elle.