One of the quintessential experiences of Cannes is having the lights go down, then having a director you thought you knew what you were getting from make a complete left turn. It happened for me watching Arthur Harari’s “The Unknown.”
This is Harari’s first feature in competition as a director. His “Onoda,” a chronicle of a Japanese soldier who spent decades living in the Philippine jungle, refusing to recognize that World War II had ended, opened the Un Certain Regard section in 2021, and he wrote the competition entry “Sibyl” (2019) and the Palme-winning “Anatomy of Fall” (2023) with his partner, the director Justine Triet.
But none of those films resembles the moody dive into fragmented identity that he serves up in “The Unknown.” Michelangelo Antonioni’s “Blow-Up” is an obvious influence, and there may be shades of Roman Polanski’s “The Tenant,” too.
The source is actually a graphic novel, “The Case of David Zimmerman,” that Harari wrote with his brother, Lucas Harari. Niels Schneider plays David, a brooding, emaciated, slightly disheveled photographer who skulks through life with a ghostly presence and a faintly biblical hairstyle. We learn that his family worries about him. At a party, he makes eyes with Eva (Léa Seydoux); Harari zooms into her gaze—and boom, the two of them rush to a basement to have sex, as if possessed. The lovemaking seems especially passionate for Eva, who leaves in a daze and needs help to a cab. She goes back to David’s place and, after some confused self-inspection, realizes that she is David in Eva’s body.
“The Unknown” doesn’t shy from the comedy inherent in its body-swap-by-sex conceit. Seydoux’s character does frantic internet searches on “switching bodies” and “new experimental hallucinatory drug.” After some sleuthing, she locates Schneider (whose physique is by that point occupied by a third character). The best joke has them writing a message board post seeking others in their situation—“for a documentary.”
But “The Unknown” is mostly quite serious, even solemn (the piano score by Andrea Poggio has shades of both ’70s paranoid thrillers and “Eyes Wide Shut”) in its exploration of the psychological impact of disembodiment, from physical and cultural perspectives. In one scene, the people occupying Schneider and Seydoux’s bodies have sex again, although each one’s mind is used to different gender mechanics. Throughout the film, Seydoux, a standout in the festival’s otherwise muddled “Gentle Monster” last week, is especially good at suggesting a state of continual shock.
While the film offers some of the intrigue of a detective picture, Harari is not interested in explaining the body switch. The film shrugs off whatever genre trajectory it might have pursued in favor of high-minded existential questioning. The final section, certainly, straddles the line between the profound and the pretentious. But Harari has done something relatively few directors have managed to do at Cannes this year: He’s pulled off a surprise.
Jeanne Herry, a screenwriter-actress-director whose credits include the Corsica-set “The Kingdom,” which showed in Un Certain Regard two years ago, is also making her competition debut as a director this year. Her film is called “Garance” in France but “Another Day” in other territories. Why would anyone want an international title that people could remember?
Garance (Adèle Exarchopoulos) works in a theater company and is reliably a center of chaos: She makes verbal gaffes, casually drops major news (“By the way, I’m pregnant,” she tells the man she’s been seeing. “The abortion’s scheduled Thursday”), and has an apparent habit of being found in a bathtub with a massive hangover.
Alcoholism turns out to be the root of many of Garance’s problems. Her troupe recognizes that and dismisses her, urging her to get help. Garance takes work in dubbing but, because of her dependency, lacks the precision the job requires. She starts a relationship with a woman, Pauline (Sara Giraudeau), who can’t keep up with her drinking.
In perhaps the screenplay’s most shameless effort at giving Garance a motivation to sober up, Garance’s sister (Mathilde Roehrich) receives a leukemia diagnosis six months into a pregnancy. She emphasizes that Garance needs to get clean to be present for her niece.
It’s when “Another Day” shifts from a character study to a full-fledged recovery drama that it turns from merely aimless to mildly insulting. Surely getting sober from a starting point of more than a dozen drinks a day is not as breezy as it is made to look here. The curtain line, meant to be uplifting, feels premature.
