With her follow-up to 'Queen of Hearts,' the only woman director in competition at Venice unfolds a provocative but predictable psychodrama about sexual shame in post-WWII Copenhagen, anchored by a magnetic Mathilde Arcel.
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Jasper Spanning Against the rubble gray and stiff mahogany with which director May el-Toukhy washes out her post-Second World War Copenhagen, the pops of crimson in “Woman Unknown” announce a stark symbolism that’s about as subtle as the red swastika eventually smeared on the front door of protagonist Marie (Mathilde Arcel). As obvious as these subliminal scarlet letters may be, they’re not without a certain Hitchcockian power in a film about sexual shame and a kind of violence against women’s bodies that operates from the inside out. But as this is el-Toukhy — whose steely 2019 incest drama “Queen of Hearts” was promptly adapted by French provocatrice Catherine Breillat in “Last Summer” — the film’s feminism, or lack thereof depending on how you take your empowerment, is a prickly matter by design.
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