Belgian auteurs Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne return with their tenth feature film, the social-realist film noir The Unknown Girl. Here, the pair discuss the film’s journey from original concept to the big screen…
How did The Unknown Girl, the story of a young GP, come about?
Jean-Pierre Dardenne: At the beginning, there was the character of a doctor whom we called Jenny. We talked about this for several years. A doctor who feels responsible for the death of a young, unidentified immigrant girl, and who tries to discover her name so that she will not be buried anonymously… so that she will not disappear as if she had never existed.
Luc Dardenne: Jenny feels culpable, responsible. She refuses to do nothing, she refuses to say: “I didn’t see anything, I didn’t hear anything…”. Jenny takes care of her patients, she listens to their bodies.
How important was it for you to film this?
LD: Yes, it was. The characters endure a lot of psychosomatic reactions: dizzy spells, stomach aches, epileptic seizures… The body always responds first: it speaks, expressing things when we cannot put them into words. Jenny is in tune with her patients’ suffering. She tries to ease them while investigating the identity of the unknown girl.
JPD: We wanted Jenny to be someone who listens to her patients words and bodies and who, thanks to this ability to listen, becomes a midwife to the truth, whose surgery becomes a confessional.
Did you do any research with actual doctors?
LD: A doctor friend whom we’ve known for years served as a consultant during the writing process. She also came on set to help with the medical scenes. In addition, certain scenes were inspired by stories we heard from doctors we met.
At the beginning of the film, Jenny tells Julien, her intern, that you always have to “be stronger than your emotions”. What follows partly contradicts that claim.
LD: Like any doctor, Jenny shouldn’t trust her emotions when it comes to making a medical diagnosis, but they may come in handy when interacting with her patients and helping them… and even more during her investigation to discover the dead girl’s identity. In her own way, Jenny is also an “unknown girl”. We don’t know anything about her past or her personal life.
JPD: We see her make a life choice, she turns down a profitable career opportunity to remain working as a GP in the banlieue, because she believes that’s the only way she will be able to discover the girl’s name. We felt we didn’t need to dwell on it. She leaves her apartment for good to relocate to her practice, she turns down a profitable position to work as a GP in the suburbs. That’s all you need to know about her. In earlier drafts of the script, you found out more about her life but these details seemed pointless to tell the story we wanted to tell.
LD: Jenny is possessed by the unknown girl, and this is what makes her so determined and so patient in her search for her name. It’s not a supernatural possession but a moral possession. That’s what interested us.
To varying degrees, Jenny’s patients are victims of contemporary hardships: social insecurity, the destruction of social cohesion…
LD: These characters exist in the here and now. They belong to that part of society that has been brutally excluded. However, we never wanted them to be ‘social cases’. They are individuals.
The Unknown Girl takes place in the Province of Liège.
JPD: Ever since The Promise back in 1996, we’ve shot all our films there. Even before writing the script – when we had nothing more than a vague idea of a doctor – we already knew that we’d shoot by the freeway and the Meuse River. The location for The Unknown Girl somehow came before the script.
LD: We were inspired by the freeway. Cars pass endlessly and at great speed on that road, much as the world follows its course, unaware of the significance of what’s going on in Jenny’s little doctor’s practice.
After working with Cécile de France in The Kid With A Bike and Marion Cotillard in Two Days, One Night now you’ve directed Adèle Haenel in The Unknown Girl.
LD: We met Adèle in Paris when she won an award for Suzanne. After exchanging just a few words with her, we wanted to cast her as our doctor. She was able to embody the brightness of youth, as well as a naivety, an innocence capable of opening the hardest hearts.
JPD: We rehearsed for four weeks with our actors before the shoot. Not read-throughs, but on location by working on the situations and the movements. Adèle was there every day during this vital process, always asking questions and coming up with ideas. She’s at the same time spontaneous, unpredictable and light-hearted. Her creativity brought us solutions we hadn’t thought of ourselves.
You also cast your ‘fetish’ actors, Olivier Gourmet and Jérémie Renier.
LD: We always enjoy working with them. In The Unknown Girl, we also cast Thomas Doret who played Cyril, the kid in The Kid With A Bike, Morgan Marinne who played Francis in The Son and Fabrizio Rongione with whom we’ve worked several times. We also enjoyed working with Olivier Bonnaud, a young French actor who was a wonderful revelation.
The Unknown Girl opens on Fri 02 Dec. To find out more and book tickets head here.
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