‘Woman Unknown’ Is a Tense Portrait of Postwar Denmark

Early in May el-Toukhy’s film Woman Unknown, Marie (Mathilde Arcel) consoles her soon-to-be-stepdaughter, Leonora (Flora Yde Sander), with some strange advice: “Did you know you can choose not to feel sad?” The seven-year-old is crying over her dead mother. Rather than dwell on the loss, Marie suggests that she simply put it out of her mind, “like how during a lightning storm, we close the curtains.” 

Marie and Leonora live in a mansion-like apartment in downtown Copenhagen, in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War. Leonora’s father Christian (Carsten Bjørnlund), the owner of a successful glove factory, is a member of Denmark’s patrician class who reveres order and rules. When Marie walks Leonora to school, every window they pass is draped in a Danish flag. Woman Unknown takes place during a “state of exception” a term coined by the German legal scholar (and later Nazi) Carl Schmitt to describe the power vacuums that open up in response to a crisis—though in this case the exception is the demise of Nazism itself. Formerly occupied and unwillingly complicit, Denmark is flexing its muscles as an independent state once again. Armed gangs of Resistance members roam the streets, eager to punish anyone who was too friendly with the old regime.

Another state of exception is taking place inside Marie and Leonora’s home. Until recently, Marie was employed as one Christian’s many housekeepers; now, he has chosen her as his second wife. She clearly considers the proposal as a kind of promotion, one in which added job security is traded in for conjugal duties. Every morning, Marie wakes up next to her fiancé and dashes downstairs to make his coffee with the rest of the kitchen staff. She’s still far more of a maid than the lady of the house, the way the Resistance members in the street still behave more like a mob than the new state. For the first half hour of Woman Unknown, the film slips between this calm domesticity and the disorder outside through a series of fading, gossamer crosscuts. Though they feel worlds apart, it’s only a matter of time before the two realms collide.

In her careful way, el-Toukhy lays the groundwork for a subtly stunning political allegory that doubles as a feminist manifesto. Through Marie, she imagines Denmark as the coerced mistress of a genocidal regime, whose level of complicity must now be uncovered and judged. Unbeknownst to her future husband, Marie lived with a German soldier during the war and even bore him a son, who died during childbirth. She is terrified of anyone learning her secret, and the lengths she is willing to go to protect her place in Christian’s home become the stomach-turning subject of Woman Unknown. More than once, Marie watches from a street corner as Resistance members cut the hair off a woman accused of providing sexual services to the old occupying force. After being shorn with dull clippers, they are stripped, painted with a red swastika and forced to walk the streets under threat of further violence. Marie’s life in Christian’s orderly world feels so far from these scenes that it’s chilling to realize only a word or two between men separates her from the same fate. 

Shortly after Marie runs into Karl (Thorbjørn Hedegaard), an old wartime acquaintance, the same red-painted swastika appears on the door of Christian’s apartment building. It’s far from a direct accusation—Christian’s employees were the target of a recent Resistance investigation, and any of his maids could be guilty—but it sends Marie into a panic she innately suppresses. She begins adding stops to her usual routine of errands: a pawned engagement ring here, a well-placed bribe there. Marie already loses herself each night to drops of opium, given to her by her doctor to cope with her difficult childbirth. What’s a few more layers of dissociation and deceit?

Arcel is mesmerizing in the role of Marie, turning in one of the best performances of the Venice Film Festival so far. Going about her business with the slightly confused look of a sleepwalker, she masterfully maintains the composure of a woman for whom every false step or careless word could mean annihilation. When Karl shows up unannounced at Christian’s apartment and asks Marie if she loves her future husband, her slightly hesitant reply of “very much” suggests many possibilities, including that of a woman who no longer knows her own mind. Marie has been closing the curtains on bad thoughts for so long that it’s become second nature. Behind them lurk possibly unbearable levels of grief and shame for her former life.

If Woman Unknown feels effortless as an allegory, layering connections between the personal and political like mille-feuille, it’s less convincing as a straightforward period piece. Time and again, small details blur our picture of the past. When Christian, learning of the ominous mark upon their door, insists they don’t try to remove it because “We have nothing to hide,” the line jars: This is a society of recently freed people who can barely utter the word “swastika,” much less see one on the street. Though Christian is clearly wealthy enough to have a spacious home all to himself, he shares his apartment building with Fru Berg (Sofia Nolsøe), a single mother who wears trousers, smokes cigarettes and doesn’t give a damn what people think of her. Berg is clearly meant to serve as a kind of foil to Marie (the windows of their rooms face out on one another), showcasing the life she could have, as well as the life that was taken from her. Marie occasionally babysits Berg’s son when the other woman is out leading her liberated life, and the joy she exhibits around children may be the only authentic emotion she’s still capable of.

When, after days of agonizing over the swastika, Marie begins to question whether it might have been meant for Berg, the pieces of Woman Unknown lock into place, and el-Toukhy twists the knife. A woman being ruled by a man the way a state is ruled by invaders describes one level of patriarchy; women turning on each other to reinforce their position within this structure takes the matter much further. Indeed, the complicated nature of Woman Unknown’s dual states of exception leaves little room for liberation without contraction. By turning on her neighbor, Marie takes agency over her life, acting more like the woman of the house than just another servant. And it’s hard to imagine what awaits Marie if she were to try to make it on her own. Berg’s life looks nice from the other side of the window, yet feels out of another era entirely, removed from Marie not just by two panes of glass but several decades of women’s liberation. Then again, one of the upsides to such destabilizing states of exception as war are the possibilities they generate; women have often achieved newfound levels of de facto empowerment while men were off fighting, though positions of agency were gradually stripped away when institutional order returned.

For Marie, her greatest dreams don’t get far beyond simply maintaining Christian’s house, marrying the man she possibly loves “very much.” A historical powder keg about collaboration and coercion, Woman Unknown makes for a chilling companion piece to Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest. In both films, shades of violence lurk beneath the trappings of a well-ordered life: the folded linen, crystal glassware, and proper placement of silver.