2006, Italy/France
Crime, Drama, Mystery, Thriller
What drives a woman to dangerous actions? A lover? A treasure? Something precious that was stolen long ago?
In Unknown Woman, Ukrainian Irena finds herself in Italy, but nothing is by accident. An expensive yet rundown apartment with the right view is a quick sell, as is a lowly job despite better ones that are offered to her. She is focused on a plan that risks revealing itself through her paranoid actions.
Central to Irena's secret is a jeweler's family of three, and her greatest affections fall to young daughter, Thea. However, for every warm moment that Irena shares in the present she reflects on a harsh memory from her past that shatters her confidence. Her maternal love as the child's nanny is contrasted with brutal flashbacks of sexual assault.
What may be surprising is that this dark thriller is the work of Giuseppe Tornatore, the same director who helmed the endearing love letter to film, Cinema Paradiso, and who has not written or directed since 2000's Malèna. With this film he prefers to channel Hitchcock rather than reminisce, and even Ennio Morricone's (who scored Cinema Paradiso and Sergio Leone westerns) composition mimics Bernard Herrmann's music for Vertigo at an appropriately dizzy stair scene.
Unlike Hitchcock's heroine, this film is viewed through the woman's eyes rather than from the victim of her scheme, and the truth is only slowly revealed as a side effect of her internal pain. The two films share a woman's unwilling transformation at the hands of an obsessed man, though the subjugator in Unknown Woman is made of far more devious stuff.
Kseniya Rappoport portrays Irena with defiant determination. She is a woman who seeks her own happiness while succumbing to the evil that has mostly devoured her. Her intention is harmless, but she no longer knows how to achieve it without putting others at risk. Even as she attempts to guide a loved one through murky waters, she repeats the same behaviors that scarred her in the life she is trying to escape. Her own shadow becomes as frightening as the living ghosts that haunt her.
Tornatore may not accomplish Hitchcock's slick methods, but The Unknown Woman is a dark and perplexing tale that succeeds in maintaining intrigue. The audience may become distracted by ominous clocks, dying vegetation and darting eyes, but the underlying tragic story drives the mounting suspicions of its tangled characters.