French director Arthur Harari might be best known as the co-writer of Anatomy of a Fall, but prior to that he saw 2013’s Peine perdue land at the Venice Film Festival’s Critics’ Week and his 2021’s Onoda: 10,000 Nights in the Jungle open the Un Certain Regard section. Themes of identity shaped through performance and deception, moral ambiguity within political and historical systems, and obviously isolation are key to his cinema. For the just under two hour The Unknown, he employs Léa Seydoux, Niels Schneider and filmmaker Radu Jude for the tale of David Zimmerman, a photographer who no one knows it. When friends drag him to a wild party, he spots a woman in the crowd and can’t take his eyes off her, he follows her… A few hours later, David wakes up : he’s in the body of the unknown woman. The France, Belgium, and Italy co-production is officially film #13 of 22.
The world premiere for the first of the two Monday screenings took place and this film will be the film to divide critics – from love to loathe we have a current average of 3.0 for The Unknown. Neon have themselves a true marketing project on their hands.
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