(LA SCONOSCIUTA, Giuseppe Tornatore, Italy 2006, 118 min., Italian/subtitles)

In a gripping work of suspense from the director of Cinema Paradiso, a mysterious woman (Xenia Rappoport) uses desperate means in order to be hired as nanny to an upwardly mobile couple’s young daughter. As the story slowly reveals her motives, the woman’s disturbing past comes back to haunt her. Tornatore’s usual composer Ennio Morricone contributes another beautiful music score.

Program Notes

This morally ambiguous and complicated film comes from the Oscar ® winning director Giuseppe Tornatore. While in most cases, it is too problematic to credit a single filmmaker with the creation of a film due to the way a film is so multiply-authored, Tornatore is somewhat of an exception. More than a director alone, Tornatore performs as writer for his films as well. In 1991, he even formed Sicarlò, a production company of his own. The degree of control and influence he has in his films allows for some common themes and traits to run throughout his work. This consistency is supported by the fact that he frequently collaborates with the same talented people. In the case of The Unknown Woman, it is the eighth time that Tornatore has worked with renowned film composer Ennio Morricone.

However, some aspects of The Unknown Woman may appear to be a departure from Tornatore’s earlier work. For one thing, he tends to work in period pieces, so the present-day setting of this film marks unfamiliar territory for him. Furthermore, he has only directed a thriller film once before with the 1994 piece, A Pure Formality. Still, these untried characteristics of The Unknown Woman are paradoxically consistent with Tornatore’s preferred method of filmmaking. Tornatore has expressed that he enjoys working outside of his familiar environment. “I like to change genre,” he said about the psychological thriller aspects of The Unknown Woman, “It’s like returning to the fear of making my first film. And fear is an excellent workmate.”

Director Tonratore was not the only figure on the film set that was experimenting with material outside of their usual field. Actress Xenia Rappoport, hailing from St. Petersburg, Russia, auditioned for the part of the Eastern European lead role of Irena when Tornatore was holding a casting call in Moscow. While she has had extensive experience in film, television and theatre, she had not performed in an Italian production before. Tornatore remembers, “When I was interviewing her, she answered all my questions simply ‘Si.’ I finally asked ‘Do you speak Italian?’ and she said ‘Si.’ I realized she did not. However, the minute we started the screen test I knew she was the one.” Utterly fulfilling Tornatore’s claim that working outside of one’s limits of comfort can be a positive thing, Rappoport rises to the challenge of acting in an unfamiliar language and portrays a great degree of emotional complexity in the figure of “the Unknown Woman.”

This combination of familiarity and the anxiety that comes with unfamiliar and uncomfortable scenarios is really a fitting context for the film itself, which continually holds the audience on the edge of understanding the protagonist. Viewers are kept in a state of anxious uncertainty in this thriller. While this is certainly different from Tonratore’s more heartwarming films, there is some precedence for it in his other thriller, mentioned above, A Pure Formality. In fact, by looking at some of the connections between that film and The Unknown Woman, we can see how these two films fit together within with Tornatore’s career, despite seeming anomalous when compared to films of his like Cinema Paradiso.

Film scholar William Hope has noted that, “Tornatore’s films are constructed around aesthetic and narrative mechanisms that are designed to elicit substantial emotional responses from spectators.” Usually in cinema, both in Tornatore’s films and in others’, this effect is supported by building a strong emotional investment in the characters, so that the audience feels that they know them, and are allied with them. What is interesting about Tornatore’s two thrillers, and The Unknown Woman in particular, is that the identities of the protagonists are kept just out of reach of the audience. Tonratore does not allow spectators to form a concrete connection with them in the usual ways such as giving the audience access to their sense of morality, or their memories and past. Indeed, the title itself declares the elusive nature of the protagonist’s identity. And yet, Tornatore still succeeds in forging strong emotive connections between the audience and Irena, all the while holding off their intimate knowledge of, or allegiance with her. Tornatore, Rappoport, and the film in general evoke substantial affective responses from viewers, but still maintain an air of ambivalence around the morality of Irena’s actions.

Morricone’s score for the film also contributes the dual effect of emotional investment combined with cognitive detachment. His compositions for the film are frequently stirring or jarring musical pieces, but they rarely repeat themselves. The effect of this is that the soundtrack can heighten the emotional intensity of a scene, but like the ambiguous background of Irena, there is no musical theme that the audience can hook on too for consistency.

In the end, we are left with a film that is like an embodiment of Tornatore’s preference for working with anxiety and the unknown. With The Unknown Woman, Tornatore delivers a film that maintains his tradition of emotionally compelling films, but also plays with the limits of how little the audience can know about their protagonist.

~Carter Bruce, Dryden Theatre Volunteer

FOR FURTHER READING