User Reviews

Irena, who arrives in Trieste, with what appears to be a lot of cash, looking for an apartment where to live; she chooses a dilapidated place that offers an advantage: from its windows, she can spy on the building across the square. In order to gain access, Irina bribes the janitor into getting work as a maid. She seeks Gina, a woman who works for a couple that make jewelry in their spacious apartment. It is clear Irena has something else in mind, and couldn't care less for Gina.

When Gina suffers an accident, Irena applies for the position, and surprise, surprise, she gets it. The rapport with the little girl Tea becomes apparent. Valeria Adacher, the lady of the house warns her about Tea, who has what appears to be a neurological condition that makes her fall and cannot get up by herself. She also tells her not to enter her workshop ever. Irina spots the safe where the jewelry is kept. Naturally, one assumes then, her interest in gaining access to the house is to steal, but no, she has something else in mind, as we watch her going over some papers that are kept locked up. Valeria and her husband, Donato, seem not to be a happy couple. They are heard loudly arguing in the background by the maid, so all is not right in their home.

Irina and Tea form a tight bond, something that Valeria notices right away. The maid wants to teach the girl how to overcome her handicap, and to this end, she ties Tea and pushes her to the mattresses on the floor and coaxes her into getting up using her technique. In our minds we begin wondering if there is more in Irena's attitude toward Tea because it is a rare thing for a house maid to become so involved in making better someone that is not even related to her.

In flashbacks we get to know a little bit of Irena's past. She has been turned into a prostitute by Italian criminals who import these poor girls from Russia. She meets a young man who seems to love her. Since she is what she is, this lover, is made to disappear by Mold, the vicious man that controls her. Irena discovers where he has stashed his cash and tries to kill Mold with scissors, but unknown to her, he survives. Mold has a way of turning up when he is least expected.

Things turn out wrong for Irena when Valeria discovers her dark secret. She fires her and forbids her to go near Tea. Unfortunately, Valeria dies in an automobile accident for which Irena is accused of masterminding. At the same time, things about the mystery surrounding the Russian woman are revealed. In her trial, she is convicted and sent to prison. As the film concludes, we see an older Irena who is released after serving time and as she waits for a bus, who would show up to meet her?

Giuseppe Tornatore, the talented Italian director of the hugely popular "Cinema Paradiso" and "Malena", just to mention two of his previous films, makes us get involved with this complex story. Working with his collaborator, Massimo DeRita, he has created a multi layered melodrama that involves the viewer. The only problem is that many things are not completely explained. Thus, there is a hint that Donato Adacher has a lot to do in the story, although his participation is a subtle one. The other mystery is Gina, who for all appearances dies in the accident, but later is seen at the nursing home in a catatonic state, but is she really? The idea that Mold can survive the stabbing is hard to digest, after all, it's a big stretch of the imagination to think he can still be around after what Irena does to him. Mr. Tornatore is obviously playing with the viewer in making him believe to look at things a certain way, while he is deceiving our perception of the plot. If all that is superfluous, then the viewer is going to have a great time.

Best of all in the film is Ksenia Rappoport, who plays Irena convincingly. She runs away with the film. Ms. Rappoport pulls us into the story without doing much. Claudia Gerini's Valeria is also an asset in the film. Alessandro Haber who plays the janitor has some excellent moments. Michele Placido is seen as the obnoxious criminal Mold. Margherita Buy, one of the best Italian actresses working these days puts in an appearance at the last part of the film. Finally, Clara Dossena makes a valuable contribution as Tea, the sweet child in the story.

The musical score by the master of all movie composers, Ennio Morricone, will stay in our minds for a while. Fabion Zamarion's impeccable cinematography makes a great impression. We await Mr. Tornatore's next film impatiently.

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' (2004), 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.

A very good thriller indeed and very powerful in mixing Irena's present with her nightmarish past. Yet something was missing. Excellent actors (especially Alessandro Haber), a fully believable heroine, good plot, but a trifle too melodramatic, for instance in the hospital (or clinic) scene with the sick child. I cannot believe it is possible to find a dead body in a landfill (unless you are the police and use earth-moving equipment). A thumbs-up for the way the police is shown, calm and restrained. Yet it all just looked a bit too artificial. Irena's "teaching" Tea to fight for herself is didactic at best and somewhat sadistic - which fits in with Irena's past but is hardly going to really help Tea grow up, whereas the film wants us to believe just that and leads us to shed tears on the grown-up little angel in the last cadre. Small plot flaws, on the whole, which might have been redeemed by Tornatore's talent, but were not.

Moody thriller and effective drama, La Sconosciuta ranks with Nuovo Cinema Paradiso and La Leggenda del Pianista sull'Oceano among Tornatore's best movies.

Mysterious Irena infiltrates an upper-class family, while at the same time sinister people from her past stalk her. The way her story unravels is compelling, character work canny. Protagonist Kseniya Rappoport, with her gaunt face and haunted eyes, is phenomenal: she is both bitter and frail, sinister and pitiable. Supporting performances are strong.

La Sconosciuta is also surprisingly moving, earning its pathos by not pulling any punch. The main character's actions are often unsettling in spite of her sympathetic motivation, which we slowly understand through the film.

Master Ennio Morricone adds another magnificent soundtrack to his resume.

7,5/10

This extraordinary Italian psychodrama/crime thriller, with its heavy S/M undercurrent and stylish scenes of sexual torture, is almost a Spaghetti Pink Film. It is not what I expected from the director of "Cinema Paradiso", but, Sweet Jesus!, I was mightily impressed. What we know from the outset about the "Unknown Woman" of the title, played with immense courage by Kseniya Rappoport, is that she's had a life of physical abuse, brutal rape, and shocking exploitation. She's presently engaged in a scheme to hide from her jailers while searching for a a considerable stash of money. After committing a shocking crime, she gains the confidence of a woman whose young daughter she feels connected to. It isn't long before our heroine is schooling the young girl in the art of survival by slamming her head repeatedly to a hardwood floor. It is scenes like the woman's "abuse" of the girl, amongst others, that make "The Unknown Woman" a harrowing experience. I will spare you the film's most exciting and earth-shattering revelations, but rest assured you're in for a a hellish journey. The film's musical score, courtesy of Ennio Morricone, is a masterpiece, and hearkens back to some of the maestro's best giallo scores. The film is heavy on nudity and bloodshed, though, because it is built on such a strong, character-based screenplay, it never becomes an exploitation film. From performances to production design, this is top notch film-making with a bleak, sharp center. I enjoyed every razer-edged minute of it.