el-Toukhy's 'Woman Unknown': Postwar Affair, Public Shame — SkimNews
Get the Culture newsletter
Daily culture — film, music, books, the trends and ideas worth your attention. Free.
- May el-Toukhy directed 'Woman Unknown,' starring Mathilde Arcel as Marie, a maid and nanny whose sexual relationship with widower glove-factory owner Christian (Carsten Bjornlund) triggers historically rooted public shaming.
- The film draws on documented accounts of women in Nazi-occupied countries being publicly punished—hair chopped, clothes torn, swastikas painted—after WWII for relations with German soldiers.
- Marie is exposed after Thorbjorn Hedegaard's Karl, an old classmate, recognizes her at the bourgeois household; Nazi insignia subsequently appear on her building's door.
- El-Toukhy was the only woman director in Venice's main competition with the film; she previously directed the 2019 incest drama 'Queen of Hearts,' which Catherine Breillat adapted as 'Last Summer.'
- The review highlights the film's 'prickly' feminism by design: scenes of Karl's sexual violence rhyme visually with a snooty tailor taking Marie's measurements and Christian using her as a hand model, depicting a body that 'does not belong to her.'
- Marie's hidden backstory—a baby boy that forced her to flee her hometown, and her reliance on liquid opium to dull pain from sex with Christian—goes unexplained by el-Toukhy and Maren Louise Kaehne's script, though the visual cues are 'awfully close.'
Why it matters: El-Toukhy's status as the sole woman director in Venice's main competition gives 'Woman Unknown' unusual visibility at a festival historically thin on female-helmed main-lineup entries, with her track record—she was adapted by Catherine Breillat after 2019's 'Queen of Hearts'—already positioning her provocations to cross over.
Ask SkimNews
