The Unknown Girl

At their best, the Dar­d­enne sib­lings con­struct com­pelling dra­mat­ic puz­zles which don’t appear to be con­struct­ed at all. Instead their sto­ries mark some inevitable des­tiny set in motion by their hard-pressed char­ac­ters’ ago­nis­ing deci­sions. Films like The Son and L’Enfant gen­er­ate a pal­pa­ble moral force pre­cise­ly because they don’t appear to be push­ing our but­tons, just show­ing us a dra­ma so real it doesn’t need any music or fan­cy camerawork.

The Dar­d­ennes’ genius though, is to con­ceive and stage these con­fronta­tion­al every­day tales in a way that’s so per­sua­sive we rarely even con­ceive of the machin­ery and endeav­our which has put them in place. True, the cast­ing of mar­quee actress­es like Cécile de France in The Kid with a Bike and Mar­i­on Cotil­lard in Two Days, One Night has made their recent stuff a lit­tle more con­ven­tion­al, but even then the mate­r­i­al has remained strong enough to impact at almost the same lev­el as their ear­li­er high-fibre fare.

Actu­al­ly, Cotil­lard was due to return in this lat­est offer­ing, about a young doc­tor in a rough canal-side cor­ner of Liège, haunt­ed by the fate of a young pros­ti­tute who’d buzzed after clos­ing time on the surgery door and been ignored. The girl was then mur­dered near­by, leav­ing the medic rav­aged by guilt and keen to do some­thing, any­thing to make amends. It’s cer­tain­ly a pos­er of a set-up, and with Adèle Haenel replac­ing Cotil­lard in the cen­tral role, the fact she doesn’t bring the same cin­e­mat­ic bag­gage with her (she’s best known as one of the aquat­ic ensem­ble in Céline Sciamma’s Water Lilies) makes her already sharply focused per­for­mance all the more con­vinc­ing. She’s a good doc­tor. She cares. She’s also, how­ev­er, a bit of a con­trol freak. So is she dri­ven by inner good­ness to try and find the girl’s killer, or is it just that she can’t allow any­thing in her ordered lit­tle world to spi­ral with­out her control?

So far, so absorb­ing, but some­how the old chest­nut of the doc who turns detec­tive just belongs to the world of after­noon TV, and, unchar­ac­ter­is­ti­cal­ly, the Dar­d­ennes fal­ter when it comes to their art­ful way with plot­ting. The machin­ery here is all too obvi­ous, since the unfold­ing of the sto­ry essen­tial­ly depends on var­i­ous indi­vid­u­als con­fess­ing their knowl­edge of events. The dogged physi­cian is cer­tain­ly a deter­mined woman but car­ries no phys­i­cal threat or legal author­i­ty, mak­ing progress only too con­ve­nient. What’s more, every time the buzzer goes at the surgery, we start think­ing, ​‘Oh, that’ll be anoth­er nugget of expo­si­tion then’, under­lin­ing the loss of cred­i­bil­i­ty cru­cial to the Dar­d­ennes’ famil­iar mas­tery. We keep watch­ing, of course, but it’s all just slight­ly ordinary.

What reg­is­ters most strong­ly, in fact, is a moment out­side the creaky plot mechan­ics, where the stressed-out Haenel has to dri­ve some­where in a hur­ry, and the cam­era keeps her pro­file in tight focus as she screech­es round the streets. Her per­for­mance is so on-it, we’re there with her. Believ­ing, hop­ing, car­ing for her. Shame the rest of the movie nev­er hits the same peak of intensity.