Should you’ve ever caught your self having simply too good a time with “Freaky Friday” or “Your Name” or actually any entry within the oddly well-populated body-swap style, right here’s an opportunity to perform a little penance. “The Unknown” is Arthur Harari‘s third directorial feature, after “Dark Inclusion” and “Onoda: 10,000 Nights in the Jungle,” and his return to Cannes competition after co-writing Justine Triet’s blistering Palme d’Or-winner “Anatomy of a Fall.” However absent “Anatomy’s” mordant wit, and missing even the durability of “Onoda,” “The Unknown” makes ponderously heavy going of its switcheroo storyline, which is led by Léa Seydoux sulkily going through down the problem — to be honest, fairly a giant one — of embodying a personality who feels aggrieved that they appear like Léa Seydoux.
Her counterpart by the murky psychological looking-glass is French-Canadian actor Niels Schneider, right here reuniting with Harari after his César-winning function in “Dark Inclusion.” Schneider performs David, a reticent younger man with the soulful-hobo air of a Beat poet, who makes a residing as an occasions photographer however whose personal ardour is a secretive lifelong mission, inherited from his father, documenting the altering Parisian suburbs.
His condominium bookshelf is lined with picture albums during which the evolution of varied avenue corners and Montreuil storefronts is proven in then-and-now snapshots, taken many years aside. Observing how a metropolis’s facades change and questioning what that does to the municipal spirit behind them has a parallel with the most important makeover David is about to bear. It isn’t, nevertheless, a very edifying parallel, nor one which Harari’s overly cautious screenplay (which relies on a graphic novel he collaborated on together with his brother Lucas, and co-written by each Hararis and Vincent Poymiro) cares a lot to discover.
Inspired out to a celebration one evening by his gregarious finest pal (Shanti Masud), David accepts a tablet from a stranger and, nearly instantly afterwards, notices a younger lady (Seydoux) throughout the room who’s fixing him with a faintly predatory stare. He follows her right into a again room the place they’ve wordless, her-on-top, totally clothed intercourse, after which David blacks out. He makes it again to his condominium, bleary and disoriented, the subsequent morning, which is when he discovers he has one way or the other been transferred into the physique of his mysterious hookup. To all outward appearances, he’s now a girl about whom he is aware of nothing, not even her title.
It’s an fascinating intuition, to empty the body-swap premise of its comedian, Steve-Martin-channelling-Lily-Tomlin potential in order that it hews nearer in really feel to one thing like Kafka’s “Metamorphosis” — a transparent inspiration right here, albeit shorn of the novella’s absurdist gallows humor. However together with the comedy, a variety of the life has drained out of the idea too. And David has not changed into an enormous bug, he’s changed into a human lady (and one he discovered enticing sufficient to wish to sleep with within the first place), so his subsequent incuriosity concerning the physique he now inhabits appears at finest unlikely, and at worst a failure of nerve on the a part of a filmmaker decided to intellectualize an inherently organic quandary.
Maybe that would work if the movie had been working in a extra clearly metaphorical or surreal register. However every part from the muted, eyes-downcast cinematography (the director additionally collaborates together with his different brother, DP Tom Harari, returning after “Onoda”) to the characters’ poky residences and the unromantic suburban places cues us to spend money on “The Unknown” as a what-if state of affairs that takes place in the true, extraordinary world.
To not recommend that every one 137 convoluted minutes of runtime should be spent riffing on some variation on “Wow, so I have boobs now?”. However inside such an on a regular basis milieu, it’s tough to imagine anybody could be so tired of a newly remodeled physique — particularly one of many reverse intercourse. And that’s simply alone and in personal; David seems equally incurious about all of the methods society at massive will deal with him in another way, now that he seems like Léa Seydoux.
This strategy additionally robs the movie of a lot traction as a trans allegory, which might look like its most available avenue of thematic exploration, as moderately than contending with the gendered implications of now being a heterosexual man trapped in a girl’s physique, David’s transformation is handled merely as a thriller to be solved. To that finish, there are some ingenious bits of enterprise as he proves surprisingly resourceful in figuring out the lady — her title is/was Eva — and ultimately monitoring down, by a mixture of sleuthing and handy coincidence, the particular person now occupying his outdated physique.
To his shock, and our confusion, it seems this isn’t Eva herself, however Malia (Lilith Grasmug), a special younger lady who skilled an analogous cosmic calamity following a tryst at a music competition. The pair realizes that there have to be others on the market, as a result of who is aware of how far again the chain of body-hopping began?
With Malia-as-David, “The Unknown” truly does discover a bit allegorical and emotive energy. She is solely depressing in her hated male physique — although once more, the merciless irony of expressing as a lot to David-as-Eva, the person whose physique it’s, is performed self-seriously straight. And Malia can be achingly lonesome for her household life, with a sister about to get married and a doting father performed, on this headache-inducingly twisty psychodrama’s most refreshing meta-twist, by Romanian director Radu Jude.
To not make an excessive amount of of what’s a comparatively small (although not insignificant) function, however Jude’s anomalous casting as Malia’s Marcus Aurelius-quoting, crane operator dad does carry with it a present of eccentric vivacity that the remainder of the movie sorely lacks. And within the movie’s one concession to the acquainted tropes of the body-swap canon, Malia, in David’s physique, does truly strategy her father in an try, resembling we most likely all would make, to persuade him of her actual identification utilizing her intimate data of their shared historical past.
That this surprisingly shifting scene is then revealed to be merely imaginary is one other instance of the hesitant screenplay’s irritating tendency to not comply with by on probably the most clearly dramatic penalties of its arable premise. With all due apologies to any real-world victims of supernatural body-switching, who maybe regard the movie’s high-mindedness as a welcome corrective to the situation’s flippantly comedic remedy in popular culture extra usually, the true unknown of “The Unknown” is the rationale behind making a body-swap film really feel so wholly disembodied.
