Shame, Power, and Postwar Secrets: May el-Toukhy's Danish Venice Drama
In Venice, May el-Toukhy's Woman Unknown uses a stern, bourgeois Danish setting and Mathilde Arcel’s magnetic performance to probe how sexual transgression is punished within private life, drawing on postwar Nazi-era stigma; the provocative psychodrama is visually austere with Hitchcockian echoes, but its stance on feminism remains prickly and its ending bleakly unresolved.
