The Dardenne brothers are the aged darlings of Cannes and have been churning out festival winners for decades. Their last offering was Two Days, One Night in which redundant worker Marion Cotillard struggles to get her job back. With The Unknown Girl, this time the story is of a doctor (Adele Haenel) struggling to find the identity of a dead woman. While neither story tastes of reality, this time the directors give us a much less likely story to swallow.
Haenel is Dr Davin, working at a practice on the expressway and ministering medical aid to the more impoverished denizens of the town. Working alongside her is med student Julien (Olivier Bonnaud), a man who does not so much have a bad bedside manner as no manners at all. Haenel looks pretty convincing as this busy locum, filling in before moving on to a bigger and fancier practice. But when a young woman rings on the surgery doorbell, this is like an alarm bell ringing out a warning that this story is about to lose the plot. Unfortunately for the viewer, we only get to realise this in retrospect.
When the woman is found dead on the riverbank near the surgery, Davin sets out on a mission to discover the Jane Doe’s identity. This would be fine if she had come up against a police officer unwilling to follow up the case, but it turns out that she is actually impeding them as they go about their work. The story might have worked better as a one-woman detective thriller, but instead we have to endure seeing the doc plodding from house call to house call in her tartan duffle coat, more Paddington Bear than Dr Quincey. As Dr Davin continues her search, she is threatened, attacked and verbally abused, yet Haenel’s face remains almost impassive bar the odd tear. Understatement is all well and good, but there are times when a little more emotional engagement is necessary.
There is also the issue of the Belgian health service. It should be renowned worldwide if this film is anything to go by. Doc Davin can issue orders to social services and with one phone call sort out a patient’s gas payments. Having seen I, Daniel Blake in Cannes just days earlier, this was a particularly unbelievable scene. Davin also makes house calls to people with tummy ache and school supervisors drop off kids at the surgery when they have a problem. Even if we let these points go, there is still the implausible storyline and ridiculous subplots to contend with. Poor Adele Haenel, who was so great as the feisty Madeleine in Love at First Fight, is glum and poker-faced for much of the movie.
The film deals with communal guilt and the search for redemption. It depicts a society that is culpable for the death of a woman and which does not want to bear the blame. Dr Davin is honourable in her quest to give this woman an identity and to admit her part in the woman’s demise. This could have been such an interesting tale and it is an important issue as we consider our collective guilt at the treatment of refugees and immigrants in our society. But the Dardennes have not matched their earnestness with their filmmaking this time round.
