The Penile Code: el-Toukhy Explores the Gendered Paradox of Liberation
Something is certainly rotten in the state of Denmark following the country’s liberation from Nazi occupation in May el-Touky’s third feature Woman Unknown, a bleak, dismal portrait of women determined to be ‘horizontal collaborators’ as a means of survival. Part of the problem was the rubber band effect of heteropatriachy for countries desiring to return a sense of normalcy whilst also ‘righting the wrongs’ of those who who’d become ‘too’ friendly with the Nazis, while political and economic factors assisted in determining who would be irrevocably banished from polite society. But what about those who had nothing to lose in the first place?
After her scandalous incest/statutory rape narrative The Queen of Hearts (2019), which was blasted even further into a murky gray area by Catherine Breillat’s remake Last Summer (2023), el-Touky wades into equally troubling territory (although arguably less contentious) with her first period piece, examining how women’s bodies are not only currency but veritable vehicles of survival, the plundering of which becomes a double edged sword. Liberation from the Nazis did not mean liberation from men.
Marie (Mathilde Arcel) works as maid and nanny in the home of wealthy entrepreneur Christian (Carsten Bjørnlund). A widower with a young daughter, Christian has chosen Marie to be his next wife, a worthy cause for celebration as the country basks in the euphoria of recent liberation at the end of WWII. While fussing with the preparations for the impending wedding, slowly extricating herself from her role amongst the help, she runs into an old acquaintance, Karl (Thorbjørn Hedegaard) while on the tram. Karl knows several secrets about Marie’s past, including her pregnancy from a German soldier, which would prove ruinous to her new future. As the resistance continues to ferret out those who collaborated with the Nazis all around them, Karl paints a red swastika on the front door of Christian’s house, and the brief calm Marie had been enjoying suddenly forces her down an even darker path.
There have been a number of high profile international films detailing the treatment of women who’d been ‘colluding’ with German soldiers, often recuperated in agonizing detail. Monica Bellucci in Giuseppe Tornatore’s Malena (2000) manages to be a bit more palatable (told from from the perspective of a young boy) than the agonized Nina Hoss in Max Farberbock’s A Woman in Berlin aka Anonyma (2008), based on a true account. From the sobering lens of the present, Alice Diop includes the public shaving of women’s heads in Saint Omer (2022) as an entry point examining how women’s bodies are still policed. Wartime has little to do with the lack of agency a woman has over her body, but like any distinction which allows for additional layers of vulnerability, the extent of suffering is always magnified during cultural instability generating chaos or conflict.
Woman Unknown is a film which depends almost entirely on the success of a lead performance, and Mathilde Arcel’s mounting terror at being discovered is formidably tense, her compartmentalized identities slicing into one another for the creation of psychological wounds it’s unlikely she’ll ever truly recover from. There’s initially a waifish essence to her, reminiscent of someone like Thomasin Mackenzie. Slowly we learn Marie’s traumatic background, and each step she takes causes a ripple effect of destruction, threatening her tenuous opportunity for a better life. But, at what cost? The class imbalance, despite her marrying above her station, will forever dictate a gross lack of equanimity with the ironically named Christian. There’s an essence of Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre here, likewise Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca, both narratives steeped in an aggressive erasure of a previous wife still haunting the periphery. A wife is simply a role to be filled, and the better positions simply have nicer, cleaner cages others are responsible for cleaning.
el-Touky makes considerable effort to paint an extensive portrait of Marie’s internal and (literal) external scars, addicted to opiates as the only way to endure vaginal penetration following the traumatic birth of a child sired by a German soldier, adding layers to the terror in her eyes as she witnesses several women shaved and humiliated in the streets. The red painted swastika is the scarlet letter threatening to brand her, and like all creatures saving themselves from drowning, she pulls down the only person who authentically likes her (the aptly named Mrs. Berg, played by Sofia Nolsøe), a woman who also has survived shucking the rigidity of polite society despite impossible circumstances. The levels of forsakenness run deep, with tragic, irreparable circumstances.
In the film’s cruelest metaphor, Marie, on the eve of ascending to her place as madame of the house, is served a hard boiled egg, much to her dismay. Both in body and spirit, Marie is cooked. Like Magnus von Horn’s The Girl with the Needle, another despairing odyssey about women in Denmark at the end of the previous war, Woman Unknown is equally grim, and, as its title suggests, reflects the erasure of experiences and identities women have been forced to endure in a man’s world.
Reviewed on September 6th at the 2026 Venice Film Festival (83rd edition) – In Competition. 124 Minutes
★★★½/☆☆☆☆☆
