Woman Unknown sweeps Venice’s top two prizes as Gyllenhaal’s jury makes its point

The 83rd Venice Film Festival did not end where the odds said it would. May el-Toukhy’s Woman Unknown walked away with both the Golden Lion and the Volpi Cup for Best Actress, and el-Toukhy used the stage to dedicate the prize to her teenage daughter and to thank jury president Maggie Gyllenhaal for using her voice about the lack of equal opportunities for women directors in the competition. A jury that had spent the fortnight being read as an actor’s-director panel drawn to the ethics of witnessing answered exactly to that description: it gave its two biggest awards to one film about a woman the world refuses to see clearly.

Woman Unknown is set in Denmark in the days after liberation from German occupation, and follows Marie, a nanny and housekeeper in the home of a Copenhagen industrialist, whose place in that household is never as settled as it looks. The Volpi Cup for Best Actress went to Mathilde Arcel for that role — a name almost no forecast carried into the ceremony, and the surest sign that the jury was watching the screen rather than the season.

The rest of the palmarès spread wide. Lee Chang-dong took the Silver Lion Grand Jury Prize for Possible Love, the South Korean master’s return and the film most prognosticators, this outlet included, had pegged for the Lion itself. The Silver Lion for Best Director went to Ilya Khrzhanovsky for DAU, the most contested title of the edition. John Malkovich won the Volpi Cup for Best Actor for Martin McDonagh‘s Wild Horse Nine, the film that drew the longest ovation of the festival. Best Screenplay went to Stéphane Brizé, Coralie Amédéo and Olivier Gorce for A Good Little Soldier, and the Special Jury Prize to NAZA, the Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor documentary that was the only non-fiction film in competition. Malou Khebizi took the Marcello Mastroianni Award for a new young performer.

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The snub the room kept returning to was Werner Herzog‘s Bucking Fastard, which many had placed on the Grand Jury Prize podium and which left the Lido with nothing. And the gap between reception and result had a face: Wild Horse Nine earned the festival’s loudest applause and converted it into a single acting prize, not the Lion — a reminder that an ovation is a room’s verdict, not a jury’s.

The most awkward line on the sheet was Khrzhanovsky’s. DAU arrived under protest — its premiere drew objections over the project’s methods and the presence of conductor Teodor Currentzis, defended from the podium by festival director Alberto Barbera — and a Best Director prize for exactly that film hands the debate a second life. A jury foregrounding the ethics of who gets to make images, and how, chose to reward the edition’s most ethically argued-over one. That tension, more than any single winner, is the story Venice sends into the autumn.

There were surprises beyond the top line. The consensus Golden Lion, Possible Love, slid one step down to the Grand Jury Prize; the consensus Best Actor lane, built around Vincent Lindon in A Good Little Soldier, resolved instead into a screenplay award for that same film, with the Volpi going to Malkovich. A field that critics had called an off-year on paper produced a palmarès almost no grid predicted — which is usually the sign of a jury that watched independently of the noise.

What changes now is the runway. Woman Unknown leaves the Lido as Denmark’s likeliest awards-season standard-bearer and Arcel as its discovery; Lee Chang-dong carries a Grand Jury Prize into a fall built for auteur returns; and McDonagh’s Wild Horse Nine, ovation and Volpi in hand, now has the commercial runway a Lion could not have improved on. The competition scatters toward release. The argument about whether Gyllenhaal’s jury read the year right will outlast every title in it.

Tags: Venice Film Festival, John Malkovich, recap, Lee Chang-dong, May El-Toukhy, Woman Unknown

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