La Fille inconnue
Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne (2016)
Jenny Davin (Adèle Haenel) is a young general practitioner working in Seraing, near Liège (the Dardenne brothers’ home turf and the usual setting for their films). When the buzzer on the entrance to the surgery sounds, well after the end of normal opening hours, Jenny tells her medical student intern Julien (Olivier Bonnaud) not to answer. The next day, as she arrives for work, Jenny learns from the police that the body of a young woman has been discovered on the banks of the nearby River Meuse. The police ask to look at the health centre’s CCTV to see if it shows anything useful to them. Jenny readily agrees. The dead girl, who hasn’t been identified, turns out to be the person whose call the previous evening was ignored. The CCTV footage lasts only a matter of seconds but shows that the girl (Ange-Déborah Goulehi), as she tried to gain entry to the health centre, was in a greatly agitated state.
The first twenty or so minutes of The Unknown Girl characterise and contextualise Jenny Davin very well. She’s businesslike to the point of brusqueness but essentially compassionate and extremely hard-working. The decision she took in the film’s opening scene was misleading insofar as Jenny appears to be on call day and night. There are eloquent illustrations of the various difficulties faced by her patients. An immigrant (Kamil Alisultanov) has resisted going to hospital for fear of being required to produce his passport; his leg wound is now much more serious as a result. A seriously overweight elderly man (Jean-Michel Balthazar), suffering from diabetes and foot sores, has no heating in his apartment because of problems with a budgeted meter; Jenny phones social services on his behalf to get this sorted out. She herself lives a solitary and somewhat Spartan existence, and the degree of her professional commitment makes this credible in both respects. Her meals are as basic as her wardrobe. She allows herself an occasional, stress-relieving cigarette, smoked through an open window. The evidence of her strong sense of responsibility to others makes Jenny’s distress about failing to respond to the girl’s call at the surgery very believable. To make matters worse, she tells the police, she instructed the intern not to answer the door only because she wanted to exert her authority. (It was clear from the exchange between Jenny and Julien at the start that his mixture of taciturnity and lack of initiative was vexing her.) The detectives (Ben Hamidou and Laurent Caron) assure Jenny she has no reason to blame herself, but to no avail – she’s thoroughly shaken up. She was about to start work with what appears to be a larger and better-resourced medical practice but decides to pull out of the new job.
The continuing anonymity of the dead girl is all too believable as well. The Dardennes use it to make a political point and they do so effectively. The Unknown Girl starts to go wrong as the writer-directors expand their communitarian message: the result is a story that is immediately absorbing but increasingly implausible. There don’t seem to be enough hours in the day for the professional doctor to turn amateur sleuth but this is what happens. Jenny, impelled by remorse for ignoring the unknown girl, resolves to find out who she was and how she died. The Dardennes’ gritty naturalism makes matter worse. If we weren’t so convinced by Jenny’s personality and situation in the early stages, it mightn’t be so hard to accept her in the basically conventional whodunit (and who got dun) plot that develops. Adèle Haenel inhabits her role so thoroughly that we always believe in Jenny as a real person. That reality exposes the growing improbability of her behaviour.
We can accept (just about) that Jenny would be so affected by what’s happened that she buys a cemetery plot in which the dead girl can be buried if no family members come forward to claim her body. We can’t accept that so conscientious a person as Jenny would exploit her medical position to play detective. An examination of one of her patients, the teenage Bryan (Louka Minnella), is, in effect, the starting point in the process of solving the mystery. From then on, Jenny keeps pushing Bryan and subsequently his father (Jérémie Renier) to tell her what they know. It makes no sense either that Jenny would fail to keep the police – whom she recognises as colleagues to the extent that they too provide a social service – up to speed with much of what she’s finding out. A visit she makes to a cyber-café, for example, yields important information that has no implications for patient confidentiality but which Jenny keeps to herself until very late in the day. No wonder the real detectives get pissed off with her.
Jenny’s persistence eventually leads both Bryan’s father and the cyber-café cashier (Nadège Ouedraogo), who turns out to be the dead girl’s sister, to own up to, respectively, what they’ve done and who they are. (Reluctance to do so is, in both cases, very understandable.) This seems meant to confirm the social responsibility theme but the effect is weak – partly because these two individuals’ relationships to the title character are too particular, partly because most viewers will by now have lost belief in The Unknown Girl as a social document. Even at 106 minutes, it feels padded: a subplot involving Julien’s decision to abandon his medical career and Jenny’s successful attempts to change his mind feels, in the world of the Dardennes that we’ve come to know, anomalous in its neatness. In spite of all this, the film is well worth seeing. The acting is excellent throughout: Adèle Haenel, working with the Dardennes for the time, gets good support from regulars in their films – notably Olivier Gourmet, Jérémie Renier and Fabrizio Rongione. Gourmet has a startling outburst of anger as a man rattled by Jenny’s snooping. Renier defines the changing moods of Bryan’s father sharply and strongly. At a reception held for Jenny to welcome her into the new job she doesn’t take up, Rongione has a good affable tenseness as the senior doctor in the practice. The Dardennes demonstrate again that doing without music in a film is not only possible but can be dramatically fortifying. The orchestration of doorbells, buzzers and phone ringtones is an expressive and sufficient soundtrack to The Unknown Girl.
5 December 2016
