Reseñas de la crítica

These tight-knit filmmakers have run the risk, like many contemporary auteurs reliant on the festival and arthouse circuit, of making their style and subject into a rigid template that gets exactly repeated every time … or else their ‘signature' will be neither recognised nor honoured. Where the disappointing Two Days, One Night showed the brothers in a trough – if not on a treadmill – The Unknown Girl re-finds their inspiration, in a firm meshing of narrative moves with ethical questions.

What's surprising about the movie isn't at all its overall contour, which, in its clearest description, sounds like a near-stereotype of independent, low-budget, social-issue dramas. Rather, what lends the movie its vast scope and its deep resonance is the exquisite and tragic psychological insight on which it runs and the brilliant simplicity with which the Dardenne brothers realize it.

The main character has been deemed an unconvincing and unmotivated detective. In fact, like all of the Dardennes' most compelling heroes, Haenel's Dr. Jenny is first and foremost an object of physical fascination, conventions be damned. Bodies "react before they speak," the directors told me—a fitting description of their film style, generally, and of The Unknown Girl, specifically.

Paving the way for acteurism, the great critic Boyd McDonald, in a 1984 hymn to Richard Widmark, said that the performer "demonstrates the importance of the movie star over the movie and thus the importance of star reviews over mere movie reviews, with their constant complaints about plot." I have many complaints about The Unknown Girl... But Adèle Haenel, the phenomenal actress who appears in nearly every frame of the movie, proves McDonald's epigram.

In The Guardian, Peter Bradshaw called the movie "passionless," citing Haenel's "bafflingly inert performance." Her "usual spark," he complained, appeared "to be doused by self-consciousness." But this self-consciousness is the source of The Unknown Girl's animating tension. Jenny's uneasiness—a new if unstable element in the Dardennes' films—reflects their own preoccupation with the consequences of their success and status.

The film's power resides in Davin's growing awareness of her need to uncover the identity of the unknown girl, who comes in distress to her clinic but isn't admitted because of the late hour. As Davin starts to investigate, that awareness is reflected on her face and, thanks to the delicacy of Haenel's understated performance, the quiver of her jaw and the furrowing of her brow register as epiphanies.

The Dardenne Brothers return with this expressive, visceral realist mystery... The Dardennes' mise en scène, carefully composed yet open, is rendered in the fluid handheld style of their longtime cinematographer, the great Alain Marcoen. Actors, directors, cameraman: all seem to be in a process of mutual discovery, catching real life as it unfolds.

Far from being a lesser Dardenne effort, this dour semigenre film about obdurate, callous people with something to hide is one of their best. The film's genre trappings as dead-girl mystery have led the Dardennes to bore deeper into their milieu.

I was in the minority in that I found the Cannes version compellingly acted – particularly by Adèle Haenel – and propulsively plotted. On a second watch, the film's most jarring elements seemed to be highlighted, perhaps due to the shorter running time. The main issue, in the grim, rubbish-strewn naturalism of the film, is Jérémie Renier's overwrought performance and the abrupt third act reveal that he delivers.

Jenny's coolness is part of what is valued about her; her earnest attention to rules is how she demonstrates care. This complexity is given full expression by Haenel's subtle performance, which delicately expresses Jenny's smallest flickers of concern, fear or pleasure, and gradually turns an initially unprepossessing character into a figure of intense sympathy.

It is the organic strength of these sentiments, coupled with the unwavering resolve of the filmmakers—mirroring their own protagonist in their refusal to disengage from doing what they know how to do best—which closes the debate in the film's favor. Even a maculate film by the Dardennes can be recalibrated as a valuable work of art,

One exceptional choice is the Dardenne Brothers' The Unknown Girl, which a significant proportion of critics at Cannes found relatively unimportant in the context of their full body of work. I respectfully disagree. It's more of a departure, away from the usual secular sites of the talented siblings' world of proles and lower-middle parvenu. Viewing this film, in tandem with The Ornithologist, through a metaphysical filter yields a richer, more complete read.