Past imperfect

>> Giuseppe Tornatore on his latest film, the peculiar but powerful Ennio Morricone-scored thriller The Unknown Woman

VIVID VICTIM: Kseniya Rappoport and co-star Ángela Molina

by MALCOLM FRASER

Italian director Giuseppe Tornatore broke onto the international scene with the Oscar-winning Cinema Paradiso in 1988; his subsequent films, including Everybody’s Fine, The Legend of 1900 and Malèna, have gotten respectable acclaim, but never quite matched the success of his whimsical breakthrough. Clearly content with being an experimental journeyman, he switches gears again with his new film, the ambitious and disturbing The Unknown Woman.

A bold, baroque thriller stuffed to the brim with narrative and thematic complexity, The Unknown Woman stars Russian actress Kseniya Rappoport as Irena, a Ukrainian immigrant in Italy who aggressively pursues a job as a nanny for a yuppie couple with a young daughter. The story cuts back and forth between her past as a prostitute, working for brutal pimp Mold (Michele Placido), and the present, in which she schemes up ways to get closer to her employers and their daughter, Tea (Clara Dossena).

On the phone from Italy, through a scratchy connection and using an interpreter, Tornatore offered some insights into this peculiar but striking film. He was initially inspired by a newspaper article, some 20 years ago, about a woman who repeatedly got pregnant and sold her babies on the black market. “There’s really no trace of that original article in the film,” Tornatore explains, “except for the basic theme—the theme of an extremely unlucky woman who is denied any right to womanhood, any right to live her femininity, and her desire to have back everything that had been denied to her.”

Rappoport’s past is revealed gradually over the course of the film; it’s difficult to discuss the plot in detail without engaging in spoilers. One of the more intriguing subplots involves Dossena as the little girl, who suffers from a psychological ailment that makes her incapable of defending herself from injury. Rappoport takes it upon herself to cure her of this with a “tough love” approach that’s disturbing to watch.

“The disease that the little girl suffers from has allowed me to relate allegorically the great theme of the protagonist,” says Tornatore. Rappoport, he explains, “teaches her how to defend herself, using the same language of violence that victimized her. She is terrified that if she doesn’t do something, the daughter will be condemned to live her life making the same mistakes, and will be unable to defend herself from the low blows of life.”

Morricone method

It’s to Rappoport’s credit that she’s able to embody such a multi-faceted character, going through a vicious cycle from victimization to empowerment through hurting others. “Originally, I was also thinking of having a non-professional actress play the part,” Tornatore recalls. “But in truth, assigning such a complex part to a non-professional actress would have been very, very difficult. So I held a series of casting calls throughout Eastern Europe to find an actress who was capable of giving to the screen the soul of this character. And I was very lucky to find Kseniya, because I could immediately see that she was the person.”

Rappoport’s emotional intensity propels the story, but the film’s style is inseparable from perhaps its strongest element, a gripping score by Ennio Morricone. The 80-year-old maestro has been scoring Tornatore’s films since Cinema Paradiso, and the two have a unique working method. “He composed a musical theme while I was writing the screenplay,” Tornatore explains. “In the second stage, he made a series of recordings of that music before I did the shooting. And then finally, we re-adapted that music while we were doing the final cut of the film.”

This work paid off; the score’s powerful presence makes it almost a character in the film. Although Tornatore denies that he’s made a Hitchcock homage, there are strong parallels to Bernard Hermann’s soundtracks—and similarly to when Hermann scored Taxi Driver, Morricone’s music reaches back to a classic filmmaking era, giving The Unknown Woman a dramatic old-school style.

“I was certainly aware that the musical commentary to some sequences that build up on suspense would be reminiscent of Hermann’s music, but that was certainly not my intention,” says Tornatore cryptically. “And I don’t think it’s necessarily a limiting factor for themes of that kind to somehow be reminiscent of an earlier, perhaps better type of film.”

The Unknown Woman
opens this Friday, April 4

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