TIFF 51: Denmark’s “Woman Unknown” is an unnerving proposition

by Cláudio Alves

It’s funny, sometimes, how films can converse with each other. And those conversations aren’t even limited to a festival’s program. As I watched May el-Toukhy’s somewhat controversial Golden Lion winner, Woman Unknown, my mind drifted to The Odyssey. Not just Nolan’s blockbuster, but all the adaptations I’ve seen of the Homeric poem and how they deal with the mass femicide near the end. Or, better yet, how they ignore it, erasing a part of the story that might have a modern viewer regard Odysseus and Telemachus as nothing but cruel men, as monstrous as any of the creatures that tried to prevent Ithaca’s king from returning home. Do the maids that served Penelope’s suitors deserve to die? Were all of them co-conspirators or women caught in a patriarchy that demanded their total subservience to the desires of violent men? And what if, like Emily Wilson, we read the word “δμῳαί” as “slave” instead of “servant”? 

To define culpability and blame isn’t something we can wholly separate from how gendered our world has been through most of its history, or the power imbalances defined within class structures. And even those who commit wrongs, atrocities beyond belief, have a right to fairness in their trials and judgments. Theoretically, they do. More often than not, one tends to ignore these problems and believe in the simple dichotomy of heroes and villains, good people and bad, and be done with it. Ontological reductionism can be so comforting. Then again, both-siding everything can be just as soothing. Woman Unknown, recently selected as Denmark’s submission for the 99th Academy Awards, denies us these comforts. Indeed, it might have been one of the most uncomfortable viewing experiences I suffered through at TIFF in the four years I’ve attended, and I don’t mean that as a negative critique. Far from it…

In France, they were called “les tondues”, those women accused of collaborating with the Axis powers during World War II. Sleeping with the enemy was an unforgivable crime. After the Nazis’ defeat, they were taken care of, often in the public square. Heads shaven, bodies stripped, painted with markers of their shame and, sometimes, assaulted in the name of righteousness. Yet, looking at the historical record, it’s difficult not to notice discrepancies in how this mob justice was applied. The wealthy and powerful, like Gabrielle ‘Coco’ Chanel, rarely suffered such indignities. And many men whose collaboration didn’t come tempered with the possibility of sexual coercion were imprisoned, mayhaps killed, but not necessarily subjected to the humiliation inherent to such gendered violence. 

May el-Toukhy’s Woman Unknown is set in postwar Denmark, rather than France, but the matter of “les tondues” travels across borders. After their invaders were pushed back in defeat, the Danish Resistance took upon itself to cleanse the nation in similar terms to their Gallic comrades. We’re shown this in long takes, difficult to watch without flinching or looking away, each actress giving their best impression of Falconetti’s Joan of Arc for our maximum disquiet. We see these scenes in detail, multiple times throughout Woman Unknown, to better understand what the film’s protagonist is running from. She’s Marie, the nanny to a motherless girl who’ll soon be her stepchild. Though she still wears her uniform, this servant is climbing the social ladder through marriage. 

Or was she, perhaps, taken advantage of by an industrialist boss, who forced a desperate woman into his bed and asked for her hand in marriage more as a promotion than as a gesture motivated by tender feeling? One need not pay a wife, not even for a new wedding dress when there’s a dead woman’s frock standing there like a satin ghost, ready to be refashioned to the current style. Moreover, a wife is useful when one’s business is selling gloves. At parties, she can model the wares, serving more as an extension of the factory’s promotional department than a life partner. El-Toukhy and DP Jasper Spanning’s Dutch, master-like domestic compositions and lighting suggest a home where relationships are transactional, and the patriarch’s rule determines everyone’s humanity or lack thereof.

Within such a scenario, it’d be easy to paint Marie as a victim, yet the director who so disturbed us in Queen of Hearts refuses to flatten her protagonist. So do actress Mathilde Arcel, editor Rasmus Stensgaard Madsen, and all others who made Woman Unknown what it is. If anything, they have Marie manifest as the most imperfect victim possible, a film character who fights off the camera’s sympathy by effacing herself before it. When a random encounter with a man from her old life, one who remembers how close she was to the soldiers who took their village, throws everything into disarray, she draws herself ever inward. The mystery deepens with the hint of answers, for the degrees of consent and autonomy that would describe her guilt remain secret, obscured by male entitlement.

Because men feel entitled to Marie, as they do most women. Even the men whose politics a contemporary audience might gravitate towards. Shouldn’t a WWII movie, including one set in its immediate aftermath, celebrate the anti-fascists rather than suggest their excesses, doubt their sense of justice? That Woman Unknown could be described as an anti-anti-fascist story is troubling, yet it’s not pro-fascism or pro-genocide either. It lives in a grey area of intersectional ideas, mostly relating to culpability. As it goes on, Marie’s survival instinct leads her down a monstrous path, but can she be blamed when her life is at stake? What are we, as a society, as Humanity, willing to accept from one another in the name of self-preservation? Where lies the line that shan’t be crossed? Is there a line at all?

That the film proposes such inquiries is remarkable, as is the counterpoint between the storm of unresolved morality lying beneath the surface and its outward classicist construction. Form acts like a slab of polished marble squishing down that swirly self-doubt. As a viewer, one bristles against the serenity of the images, their convention feeling like arms holding us back, keeping us immobile. Then again, we might see this formal device as a way of wrestling us into staying put, into interrogating our own responses to what’s being shown, dramatized from fiction yet drawn from well-documented history. By appealing to the appearance of a commonplace period drama, el-Toukhy perverts that very model, transforming it from a promoter of passive mindlessness into fuel for self-reflection. 

All in all, it’s a nasty little film, elegant as it might look. Does it explore every moral quandary with adequate nuance? I’m not sure. Does its play into formal convention always pay off? Not really, but it’s quite the thing when it does. Two subsequent scenes might be the best example, though one fears spoiling the movie. Let’s just say we have a pair of moments out of an embittered Downton Abbey-like melodrama. A breakfast and a dress fitting, an opportunity for the new lady of the house to feel power and strike down those who were once her equals and, then, a reminder that, in the grand scheme of things, she’ll be regarded as barely more than an object by most, her husband-to-be among them. That terrifying thought seems reflected in the mirror’s gaze. Though it might just be Marie’s realization that she has buried so much, so many secrets, she’s become a woman unknown even to herself. 

Woman Unknown hasn’t secured a US distributor yet, but one assumes e it’ll come eventually, sooner rather than later. The Volpi Cup, the Golden Lion, and the Oscar submission must count for something. Watch it when you can and come back here to tell me if it unnerved you as much as it unnerved me.

Comments

[Juan Carlos Ojano]

So looking forward to this since its Venice wins. Also, your review just got me even more excited. Love me some challenging, uncomfortable film watching experience.