Chris Knipp Writing: Movies, Politics, Art


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PostPosted: Thu Jun 07, 2007 7:09 pm 
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Ridiculous collage of pastiches disguised by a surprising polish

A thriller set in Trieste by the maker of Cinema Paradiso (1988) and the more recent but less remembered Malena (2000), but also the creditable A Pure Formality (1994), this film focuses in a particular way on one of Italy’s new Slavic immigrants, Irena (Kseniya or Xenia Rappoport), a young woman from the Ukraine who cleans a wealthy couple’s house and develops a very special relationship with their daughter. So a general description of the film might go. Anyone who comes to this film in the expectation of getting a credible account of the immigrant experience in Italy will, however, be disillusioned. Slavic women who come to Italy penniless may be used as prostitutes on the way to making a decent living as Irena is. But their lives, happily for the safety of the Italian home, will not be like hers.

Irena works very hard, beginning with scrubbing the big spiral marble staircase of an apartment building. But Irena never makes a decent living. She has a special reason for going to work in this building for the Adacher family (Claudia Gerini and Pierfrancesco Favino and their little daughter Clara Dossena), which we only learn later. What we find out right away is that she is ready to cheat and even kill to get this job. She steals keys and a remote beeper, and knocks an old housekeeper down a long flight of stairs, permanently disabling her.

Meanwhile whatever Irena is up to, she is doomed, because she is being pursued by a sadistic, shaven-headed, gold-chained pimp. Muffa, which means Mold, is his name, and he’s played by Michele Placido—who recently was a gentle white-bearded Dominican friar in Mario Monicelli's Desert Roses, also part of this Italian film series (it’s a small world). Irena thinks she’s killed Muffa. But she’s wrong. He's coming to get her, he's mad, and he's more sadistic than ever.

The Adacher family is dysfunctional. The husband screams at the wife, and their little girl Teo, who's alternately cuddly and manipulative, has a strange complex or illness: she can’t defend herself. You may have thought that just meant she was a girl. But she also can’t put out her arms to break a fall. Irena tries to cure this by binding her arms and legs and knocking her over. That seems inexplicable till we learn, through the ever-increasing and always violent flashbacks, that something like that was done to Irena by Muffa.

The storytelling in The Unknown Woman is so baroque, so mannerist, so melodramatic, so violent and ultimately so preposterous that it would be met with howls if it were in English. American reviewers for the art house audience are calling it “stunning,” however, and it does have some elaborate cinematography and editing, a go-for-broke performance by Rappoport, and a cast including Michele Placido and Alessandro Haber as the Portiere (building superintendent), who (small world again) was the major in Monicelli’s Desert Roses. There’s a melodramatic score by the venerable Ennio Morricone (imitating Bernard Hermann) designed to screw up the tension to the maximum. All these aspects add up to a polished package to mask the fact that this is just an elaborate mess.

There is no introduction. Irena simply comes on the screen looking stressed, an expression she wears for most of the picture. Her story will be told in flashbacks. In the latter half of the film she also regularly goes to a nursing home to visit the housekeeper she’s disabled, who can’t speak, and tells her more of her story, which we’re allowed to hear. And the flashbacks go from milliseconds long to a minute or so. It develops that Irena as a prostitute had a handsome construction worker as a lover (Nicola di Pinto). Her time with him seems to be her only happy memory. Everyone in the building, almost, is in the gold jewelry business and Mrs. Adacher designs and makes jewelry (a process not realistically rendered). At one point it looks as if Irena is out to steal the gold—and the Portiere, not a very admirable fellow, has been pilfering gold dust from the Adacher workshop. But Irena has a lot of money stashed away of her own—or somebody’s. It’s all revealed at the end—except it’s never clear what Irena’s relationship to Teo really is. If Douglas Sirk and Nicolas Ray and Alfred Hitchcock and David Cronenberg had teamed up on separate segments the result might have looked something like this, and it would fit together just as well and have more suspense and more psychological plausibility. There's even a sort of trial at the end and the film becomes a police procedural that could have been done by any of many directors working below top form. Tiring, and completely over the top, this is a very elaborate disaster and might appeal to some cult movie fans for the sheer absurdity of its endless collage of pastiches.

The Unknown Woman/La sconosciuta was shown as part of the Open Roads: New Italian Cinema series at Lincoln Center, June 2007.

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©Chris Knipp. Blog: http://chrisknipp.blogspot.com/.


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