The Unknown Girl

The Dardennes brothers (The Kid With a Bike, L'Enfant) are back with their new film The Unknown Girl out on DVD from Curzon Artificial Eye on Monday 6th February.

The film tells the story about a young female doctor, Jenny Davin (Adele Haenel) in small town Liege, Belgium; who after a long day refuses to open the door to her clinic when already an hour after closing. The next morning policemen tell her that the young woman - a black African immigrant working as a prostitute.

This starts a moral guilt in our young female protagonist, a conflicting individual who is almost bullying to her young trainee doctor. The trainee is a male and she admits she did not open the door to the girl to instill a means of superiority.

She begins an investigation to find out the identity of the young girl who has been buried without a name so here family can be informed.

The Dardennes are famous for small town stories with universal themes, here are tropes of privacy, guilt and belonging. Jenny is unusual in the sense that we do not know her history, where has she come from; we are aware of her future more with the impending clinic she may well take control of. The story makes her reassess her decisions and she does alter from lacking bedside manner to becoming a better local GP by using her local knowledge to her advantage.

Shot with gripping hand held flourish in the same vein as classic neo-realism and the better Ken Loach films, bringing a sense of documentary realism to a fictional story.

It also has a political message on immigration within EU borders in today's current political climate providing a compelling platform for this intelligent film with a brave central performance from Haenel.

The Unknown Girl is out on DVD from Monday 6th February from Curzon Artificial Eye

Victoria

Directed by Sebastian Schipper, Victoria is a gripping look at a night in the life of a young Spanish girl who lives in Berlin, and gets sucked into doing something she would not ordinarily do.

Shot in real time, the film is supposedly shot in one take as the camera follows Victoria (Laia Costa) as she leaves a nightclub at 4am in the morning to go home before work. There she encounters four guys and there is an initial flirtation with Sonne (Sebastian Lau).  He and his friends are German, and Victoria cannot talk German fluently, so in broken English they communicate about life, drink and having fun.

Halfway through the film though, there is a shift in tone as the narrative takes an abrupt turn involving a favour ex-convict Boxer (Franz Rogowski) owes someone from when he served jail time.

The hand-held camera that follows Victoria and the real-time situation creates a fear of impending doom as we follow this vulnerable girl making hasty decisions revealing her naivety because she is alone in a big city abroad.  Until the abrupt turn in the narrative, this viewer feared that Victoria was going to be a victim of sexual assault, but the shift shows how immediate a world we live in.

This is a film for the millenial era - a generation of knee-jerks and instant reaction to feel like you belong to this world.  It is a film of the here and now, and how every decision can change the rest of your life, but also how fleeting moments and meetings with people can have a further longer lasting influence.

Shot with real panache by Director of Photography Sturla Brandth Grovlen (his is the first name credited at the end of the film - and rightly so), whose camera goes where the characters go into lifts and cars; there is never a let down in the tension as the narrative unfolds.

It is a credit that while the film could be marketed as a one-take gimmick film, the cast elevate the film to something more than its selling point and a film that stays with you due to the intense performances and conviction of a director to follow through on the potential of an idea to reach the ceiling and burst through it.

Victoria is out on DVD (£13.99rrp) and Blu-ray (£15.99rrp) from Curzon/Artificial Eye on 23rd May
www.curzon.com