Unforgiving portrait of post-WWII Denmark in ‘Woman Unknown’
Daily Sabah · Nagihan Haliloğlu ·
May el-Toukhy’s 'Woman Unknown' traces the thin line between liberation and oppression, exposing how women remain the scapegoats of a society...
In her groundbreaking manifesto "Solidarity with French Women!" Houria Bouteldja asks the following question: "Why should you, white women, have the privilege of solidarity? You are also subject to men’s violence, you are also underpaid, despised, your bodies are also instrumentalized." More than anything else, May el-Toukhy’s "Woman Unknown" works as an instance of this solidarity: a visibly Egyptian-Danish woman director making a film about the history of crimes against women in Denmark.
El-Toukhy’s Golden Lion-winning "Woman Unknown" tells the story of Marie, who is a housemaid in a Denmark recently liberated from the Nazis. El-Toukhy organizes the action so that the viewer is at first not quite sure about Marie’s role in the household. We see her get out of her master’s bed early in the morning as he sleeps, wash herself and get ready for another day of chores. We soon understand that Marie is engaged to be married to her boss and think, why does he still make the woman he’s going to marry do all these menial tasks? This is, of course, el-Toukhy asking the still-pertinent question of with what mental gymnastics do men leave all the energy-sucking tasks to their wives as they go about their daily lives?
We see Danes singing and celebrating their newly found sovereignty in the street. Again el-Toukhy orchestrates it so that what the viewer sees is drunk blond men wrapped in red flags. Not a very reassuring sight. The uncanny resemblance to the German oppressors the Danes have just thrown off becomes even more heightened in the scenes where Danish women are ritually humiliated. The phenomenon of women who were suspected of having slept with Germans during World War II being detained by mobs and having their hair cut off has been depicted in cinema several times, most notably in "Hiroshima Mon Amour." With "Woman Unknown," el-Toukhy adds to this archive of representation of crimes against women in Europe.
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