Here is an elegantly appointed drama-thriller from May el-Toukhy, about sexual shame and political paranoia in postwar Denmark, with something of Alfred Hitchcock’s Rebecca, which it consciously recalls. As director and co-writer, El-Toukhy has created a shrewd and painful movie about the terrible things you need to do to survive, and what it takes to forget those things afterwards.
The scene is a prosperous, upper-middle-class apartment in Copenhagen just after the second world war, when the Danish resistance was permitted the powers of a secret-police militia to detain and interrogate those suspected of having given assistance to the Nazis. Christian (Carsten Bjørnlund) is a ageing factory owner and widower who has evidently fallen in love with his infant daughter’s nanny: this is Marie (fiercely and convincingly played by Mathilde Arcel). Or at any rate, he sees that the child needs a new mother, finds Marie attractive and appreciates her submissive attitude. They are now engaged.
As for Marie herself, her fellow servants do not appear to resent her counter-jumper prominence as the new lady of the house; very indiscreetly, she sleeps with Christian in what will shortly be the marital bed. Marie has a reasonable working relationship with housekeeper Esther (Marina Bouras) who would otherwise be Rebecca’s stern Mrs Danvers figure but is in fact pleasant enough, though she disapproves of Marie’s friendly relationship with single-mother neighbour Mrs Berg (Sofia Nolsøe), whose worldly, sophisticated air she finds disagreeable.
But poor Marie’s ability to cover up her own secret fears and sins is tested to the limit when she is expected, in a pure Daphne du Maurier touch, to wear the wedding gown of Christian’s late wife at the ceremony. She has to carry it on public transport to the dressmakers to get it altered (another Hitchcockian display), which leads to a disastrous encounter with someone from her past.
And all the time, Danish women who are accused of having consorted with Germans are shamed in the street; their heads are shaved and swastikas painted on their back. The film also shows the great and underacknowledged truth of this, in postwar Denmark as in postwar France: shaming women was a convenient way for men to divert attention from their own far more substantial and far-reaching Nazi collaboration. This includes Christian, whose factory would have gone broke without Nazi customers.
The shadow of suspicion closes in on their well-appointed household as the wedding day approaches and, as various ruses occur to her to make sure that the past does not rise up to overwhelm her, Marie discovers a new strain of cunning and ruthlessness and self-pity in herself. This is a very watchable, expertly managed drama about the return of the repressed.
• Woman Unknown screened at the Venice film festival
