Everyday incidents trigger in Irena alternately sweet and horrific memories, and these become like pieces in a jigsaw puzzle that is completed only when the film concludes, at last revealing its full meaning.
Comment
06/27/08
The Unknown Woman (2008)
62 %
Reviews Counted: 26 Fresh: 16 Rotten:10 Average Rating: 5.9/10
Consensus:
If it's occasionally manipulative, this Italian melodrama mixes thriller conventions with a poignant love story and keeps the tension rolling from start to finish.
Rated: Not Rated
Runtime: 1 hr 58 mins
Theatrical Release: 2008-03
Synopsis: Russian actress Xenia Rappoport gives a rich, complex lead performance in Giuseppe Tornatore's Italian thriller, THE UNKNOWN WOMAN (LA SCONOSCIUTA). Rappoport stars as Irena, a deeply troubled Ukrainian woman who has just arrived in Italy. She is desperate to get a job working in a... [More]
Genre: Foreign Films
Starring: Xenia Rappoport, Michele Placido, Claudia Gerini, Margherita Buy, Pierfrancesco Favino
Reviews
Top Critic
It manages to be brutal, deranged, ridiculous and heart-rending, all at once.
06/27/08
Postures as empathetic while getting its leading lady out of her skivvies -- there's nothing bold about taking a stance against human trafficking
06/27/08
Meet the filmmaker that [Tornatore] is today -- sadomasochistic fantasist, exploiter of women and cheesy Hitchcock imitator.
06/26/08
An exceptionally well-made example of the kind of delirious, semi-Gothic, overcooked melodrama filmmakers from the Boot have long specialized in.
05/30/08
Top Critic
[A] baroquely lurid and undeniably fascinating exercise in pulp with a political angle.
05/30/08
Top Critic
An unstable concoction of political melodrama, film noir, and weepie.
05/30/08
It gets more and more ridiculous and unbelievable as it goes along, and the final scene is shamelessly manipulative.
05/30/08
Top Critic
It's an uneasy mix, and not an entirely successful one. But the film is flat-out gorgeous and contains moments of sheer lunacy.
05/30/08
A riveting lead performance by Rappoport [...] overshadowed by the more frequent potboiler preposterousness.
05/30/08
Just under two hours, sumptuously photographed in noirish shades and slathered in spine-tingling music by Ennio Morricone, it twists every which way to sustain suspense until the final frame.
05/30/08
Top Critic
A restless, panicked, devastating emotional roller coaster, meticulously planned and executed like a razor.
05/29/08
Tornatore is unable to sustain tension once the heroine’s agenda is revealed halfway through, and what follows veers between ploddingly dull and unintentionally risible.
05/29/08
There is a mystique in the flow of the opening scenes that are reminiscent of David Lynch's style of filming.
05/28/08
The melodrama form allows Tornatore to examine such current issues as human trafficking and black-market babies within a yarn that, for all its sentiment, is never less than gripping.
05/28/08
Top Critic
Wanting it both ways, Tornatore presents the tragedy of sex slavery, while lavishly eroticizing it. And without a clue about female desires or dreams, whether sex slaves, servants or hysterical psychos, beyond their sexual apparatus. Unknown Woman, indeed
05/20/08
From its silly exploitation treatment of prostitution and sexual bondage you'd never imagine that Giuseppe Tornatore, the same director who created the magnificent "Cinema Paradiso," made "The Unknown Woman."
05/10/08
Top Critic
The Unknown Woman is a thriller and a love story, and those elements are mixed together in unexpected ways. It's a stunning film.
05/09/08
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