Midway through The Unknown, Niels Schneider's character in Léa Seydoux's body has sex with Niels Schneider's body possessed by another woman.
If that sounds mind-meltingly vertiginous, that's just a taste of the profound questions of identity and self that Arthur Harari grapples with in his staggering, immensely discomfiting third feature.
Body-swapping has been used as a comedic device in films for decades, including hits like Freaky Friday. Such films mine the comic potential of the premise but never contemplate the philosophical dimension of such a personal calamity. Harari bravely and unwaveringly tracks the idea to its logical conclusion with dogged seriousness and curiosity, resulting in exhilarating cinema, unburdened by conventions and alive with possibilities. You will walk out of the theater elated and enlightened, but you might also feel nauseous and anemic.
Adapted from the graphic novel The Case of David Zimmerman, co-written by Arthur Harari and Lucas Harari, The Unknown centers on David, our protagonist, a Jewish man and photographer who is on the fringes of disappearing, literally and figuratively. In these initial scenes, he is played by Niels Schneider, utterly shorn of his million-dollar heartthrob looks and muscular movie-star physique.
Schneider appears emaciated, sickly, and balding -- sapped of all his vitality. At a Dionysian party, he is beguiled and then seduced by a feral woman played by Léa Seydoux. They have torrid sex, at first pleasurable, then increasingly convulsive, until she violently climaxes and passes out.
It is then that Harari, after carefully setting the stage with his precise filmmaking, plunges us headlong into a destabilizing abyss of confusion and existential terror. After the party, returning to David's apartment is Seydoux. Seydoux is traumatized to see herself in the mirror the next morning.
This is the point where Harari audaciously collapses all boundaries between character, gender, and performer. From this point on, Seydoux plays David, something the audience must accept on its own terms. She isn't playing a man in the "trans" sense, though The Unknown supports many readings. It's just that the person who previously inhabited Schneider's body now inhabits Seydoux's.
Presumably, the twin orgasms brought about a devastating swap. Harari offers no ontological explication because none is to be had. The audience must now embark on this odyssey with David (played by Seydoux) in search of answers and, ultimately, meaning.
The genius of Harari's approach is borne out by his unyielding commitment to treating the subject with rationality and intelligence, otherworldly though it might be. David must now pick up the pieces of an instantly shattered life and do something -- anything -- to help the situation.
David pursues three paths forward: Finding out the prior identity of the new body (Seydoux), locating the old body (Schneider), and investigating whether this has happened to anyone else. The audience might wonder about a fourth path: Asking for assistance. Herein, the central tragedy of The Unknown comes into sharp relief with wrenching effect. There's no recourse to be had because David's plight exists beyond comprehension and couldn't possibly be countenanced by the world we live in.
David is utterly alone and abandoned, and Seydoux powerfully communicates the sheer helplessness of her character. Communicating what has transpired in a socially intelligible way is off the table. Any conversation with another human being can only end in ridicule or loss of liberty.
Here is material rich enough to mine the mysteries of existence and perception, but Harari's ambition pushes ever outward to scale his construction by orders of magnitude. David does eventually locate the old body (Schneider), but the discovery is shattering and brain-scrambling. Suffice it to say that another girl, Malia (Lilith Grasmug), is inextricably intertwined with the business in ways that complicate the situation exponentially.
From then on, Seydoux and Schneider grope about together as a duo, their estrangement from the rest of humanity total and complete. Every conversation is loaded with implication and irony. There are entire interactions between actors on-screen where it isn't immediately apparent which actor is which character, which gender or which identity. Each main character is shared between multiple actors, and the lead actors each play multiple characters.
The Unknown is post-pronouns, post-gender, and post-sexual orientation. These concepts are obsolete and have scarcely any meaning in Harari's vortex of mutability and displacement.
All of this might have been too impenetrable for the audience, but rest assured, Harari's steady hand guides the viewer through David's subjective experience with skill and poignancy. The script by the Harari brothers and Vincent Poymiro is a model of careful planning. The Unknown isn't undemanding; it does ask the audience to take a leap of faith.
Ultimately, all of it might have been for naught had the actors not been up to snuff. Léa Seydoux's contribution cannot be overstated, as she is beyond monumental in a role that would stump even the best actors. Here is a part that requires extraordinary imagination and freedom, and Seydoux brings all of that and more, making us believe we are watching David throughout. Seydoux is a bona fide megastar, but that shouldn't diminish her status as one of the greatest actors we can conceive of. She has always been daring and self-effacing, taking wild swings and chances, yet she's never chanced this much.
Filming postpartum, immediately after the birth of a child, Seydoux is unsparing, baring body and soul without an ounce of conceit. If your heart swells in your chest at the story's unsettling conclusion, it is because Seydoux's humanity, emotional availability, and artistry are boundless.
Schneider also ably demonstrates he's more than a matinee idol, compromising his beauty to bring his enfeebled character to life. Seydoux's and Schneider's deliberate presentation of less-than-flattering bodies is implicitly tied to The Unknown's themes of shifting corporeal reality. They play characters alarmed and disgusted by odors and body parts they do not recognize.
Their high-mindedness elevates The Unknown above the reductive interpretations that might have arisen had Seydoux adopted a butch affect, or Schneider acted overly effeminately. The inherent dysphoria is sharply portrayed by Seydoux in a moment when David, previously in a man's body, experiences sexual activity as penetration and is irreconcilably unnerved by it.
Harari deserves credit for staging what can be deemed a high-concept thriller, with enveloping and immersive realism, though inventive touches abound. The first character Seydoux plays is Eva, a German actress, and Harari has fun recreating a short film she acted in. David was already aroused by Eva before hooking up with her. Those memories persist once Seydoux inhabits the role, leading to an imagined scene in which she makes out with herself.
Emmanuelle Duplay's production design and Tom Harari's cinematography (yes, that's another Harari brother) keep us firmly grounded in the real world, shutting off any escape hatch from David's nightmare. However, the giant Trump piñatas in the opening party sequence, which the revelers violently smash, are striking. In another scene, a painted mural resembles David pre-transformation. Andrea Poggio's memorable dirge-like main theme and score shroud The Unknown in mystery and uncertainty.
Audiences might begin to wonder if all of The Unknown is a hallucination induced by a psychedelic David consumes at the opening party. But for all its escalations and extrapolations, The Unknown has an entirely consistent and self-contained internal logic that is in plain sight and available for the taking. Think of it as a cerebral analog to Arthur Schnitzler's famous play La Ronde (Reigen), only instead of a roundelay of STDs, it is an enigma leaving destruction in its wake after sexual contact.
Even so, The Unknown, due to its assimilation and metamorphosis of identities, supports several readings, including transgender identity, body dysphoria, mental illness, and even the immigrant experience -- the lead characters are Jewish, German, and Romanian, respectively. There are countless instances in which your reality can conflict with the world you inhabit. Harari sees you but doesn't tip his hand.
The Unknown is rich enough to sustain multiple planes of interrogation. He doesn't shy away from thorny questions of agency and bodily autonomy either. When David, in Seydoux's body, is confronted with the question of abortion, it is unclear who is making the decision and who should be making it. The absolute splintering of mind, body and self is Harari's gutsiest gambit.
In a further meta twist, David's grand project is to meticulously recreate century-old photographs of Paris to document how it has changed, adding yet another layer of transmutability to the film. Arthur Harari's kaleidoscopic The Unknown is a labyrinthine maze of dizzying proportions and a rewarding, edifying, and enlightening inquiry into the instability and unknowability of selfhood.