Film still of La Fille Inconnue (The Unknown Girl) © Christine Plenus
Adèle Haenel looks for The Unknown Girl by the Dardenne brothers.
After many years of thinking about this project, Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne return to Competition with an intrigue in the form of an investigation with The Unknown Girl. As with Emilie Dequenne in Rosetta (1999) and Marion Cotillard in Two Days, One Night (2014), the directors have chosen a French actress, Adèle Haenel, to play the main role among an otherwise mainly Belgian cast.
The Dardenne brothers and the Festival go back a long way. Their Palme d’or in 1999 for Rosetta catapulted them onto the international scene and brought Emilie Dequenne, who won the Best Female Actor award, to public prominence. The event also marked the beginning of their Cannes career. In 2002, they presented The Son, for which Olivier Gourmet picked up the Best Actor award. The duo struck gold again in 2005 with The Child, which garnered the Palme d'or, thus entering the privileged inner circle of directors who have won the prize twice. This was followed by The Kid with a Bike in 2011 and theselection in Competition for Two Days, One Night in 2014.
In The Unknown Girl, Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne return to the suburbs of Liège, their home town and the main site for most of their films, this time as a backdrop for an investigation with a medical twist. As always with the Dardenne brothers, the backdrop is just as important as the plot. A surgery provides the setting for a simple and profound story, which sheds light on the social status and conditions of the patients' lives. Adèle Haenel plays a young general practitioner who, having ignored an appeal for help on her own doorstep one day, is consumed by guilt when she discovers that a girl has been found dead, not far from her home.
The casting features Adèle Haenel, who first came to prominence at Cannes in 2011 with House of Tolerance by Bertrand Bonello alongside Jérémie Renier and Olivier Gourmet, first featured by the Dardenne brothers in The Promise in 1996, and who have since regularly appeared in works by the Belgian directors.
