A tale of Hippocrates and hypocrisies, the new film from Belgian brothers Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne is both eminently familiar and distinctly different from anything in their back catalogue. A hybrid of their unmistakable social-realist aesthetic with, of all things, a Sam Spade-style detective story, “The Unknown Girl” is, however, not their first dalliance with genre. Their last film, “2 Days 1 Night” with Marion Cotillard, essentially took the form of a ticking-clock thriller and it emerged as one of their most accomplished and accessible works: the generic structure gave it pace and excitement where the setting and style gave it topicality and authenticity. Here, sadly, something of the reverse alchemy seems to occur as the plot twists and revelations required of the film’s murder mystery contrive to scupper its credibility as real-world semi-reportage. And the somewhat drab aesthetic and almost vanishingly understated performance style dull the potential pleasures of a good old-fashioned whodunnit to roughly the luminosity of an above-average feature-length episode of a TV procedural.
Dr. Jenny Davin (Adele Haenel) is a working at a practice in Liege whose aging owner is being forced to retire due to ill health. She is also training in an intern, Julien (Olivier Bonnaud), and especially in reference to her snappish treatment of him, we glean that Jenny is a very good doctor, but one who believes that personal emotional involvement with her patients might cloud her judgement and is therefore to be avoided. One night, an hour after clinic hours end, the buzzer rings but Jenny orders Julien not to answer. A visit from the police the next day reveals that the young woman who rang the bell died some hours later, in mysterious circumstances, unidentified and unclaimed. Jenny takes to showing the woman’s photo, gleaned from security camera footage, to all her patients in the hopes of shaking some clue loose, and when that duly happens, she turns more or less bloodhound-on-the-trail — Philip Marlowe wielding a stethoscope instead of a gun.
It is not immediately obvious why the unsentimental-to-the-point-of-stolid Jenny’s understandable if ill-founded guilt over the death (“if I had opened that door she would be alive now”) flares into all-out obsession with discovering the identity of the dead girl (for whom she buys a cemetery plot, incidentally). But it might be something to do with her having apparently no other life outside her work. Not by so much as a phone call or a framed photograph is there anything to suggest Jenny has a single friend or family member or single hobby or pecadillo. Like the archetypal gumshoe, she lives a life of ascetic aloneness, which means she’s free to go about her investigations unencumbered, but it also makes her difficult to relate to as a human being. Soon sleeping at the office on a makeshift bed, presumably, one suspects, so she will never again let a buzzed door go unanswered, Jenny becomes more 1940s PI than 2010s doctor — all she really needs is the fedora and the tumbler of whisky. Instead, she leans out the window and sneaks an illicit cigarette.
Jenny’s characterization is problematic because it is so central to this story. This is maybe the least social-issue-driven Dardennes movie ever, dealing more in rather esoteric ideas about the way that guilt works, and how deceit can manifest physiologically, like when Jenny, in one of the film’s least convincing scenes, uses her doctoring powers as a kind of lie-detector (“Your heart rate went up after you saw the picture, and yet you said you’d never seen her…”). It’s not that there are no interesting ideas brought up in these discussions, it’s that she is such a closed-off character (she smiles maybe twice in the film) that making her psychology so pivotal to the dramatic arc of the film feels like a lost cause. With the film’s title inadvertently applying as much to Jenny as to the doomed young woman, it’s just too hard to care about her, and we’re given no one else to care about.
It makes you realize just how much previous Dardennes movies have been stories told through movement and momentum — the brothers’ observational style is such that the action, whether it’s going door-to-door to plead for your livelihood or precariously carrying a baby across a highway, is the way the story is told. But “The Unknown Girl” is ultimately a much more introspective and static piece of work — it’s really a psychological story, but it just doesn’t feel like their style is suited to that kind of interiority. In a Cannes competition year shaping up to be one of the most consistently excellent in recent memory, it’s topsy-turvy land that the Dardennes, two- time previous Palme d’Or winners and models of consistent excellence, should be the ones to turn in a disappointment. [B-]
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