La desconocida giuseppe tornatore biography
La sconosciuta l. The Unknown Woman is the surprisingly stunning new movie by Giuseppe Tornatore, known to international audiences mainly for Nuovo Cinema Paradiso , best foreign language movie at the Academy Awards. After directing Monica Bellucci in Malena in , Tornatore dedicated himself completely to the big project on the Leningrad siege left behind by Sergio Leone after his death.
The Unknown Woman (Italian: La sconosciuta, lit.
La Sconosciuta marks a break from the overwhelming research work for the still-active project. Set in a north-eastern contemporary Italian city, La Sconosciuta follows the trials and tribulations of Irena Ksenia Rappoport , a young Ukrainian girl searching for a job. She settles in an old and pricey flat, and, thanks to a selfish caretaker, starts working as a cleaning woman in a rich and distinct building situated in front of hers.
The distant and diffident people around Irena start to embrace and accept her, and while we watch her painstakingly cleaning a big, dirty spiral staircase, she gets more and more in touch with a nanny Piera Degli Esposti who is working for a family of rich goldsmiths, the Adacher Claudia Gerini and Pierfrancesco Favino , taking care of their young girl newcomer Clara Dossena , deprived of any defensive reaction by a rare disease.
The movie is structured around a duality. The timeline which separates the present life of Irina from the old one is physically correlated to the division between the two houses: her house, and the house she works in. Most Italian press superficially defined the movie a noir, which is usually a good-for-all definition, and especially good and easy here, when we are facing a deliberate and bizarre fusion of genres.
Yes, a distinct noirish out-of-the-past scheme is at work here.
La desconocida es una película dirigida por Giuseppe Tornatore con Kseniya Rappoport, Michele Placido, Claudia Gerini, Margherita Buy .
But La Sconosciuta is less noir than thriller, only, with an added melodramatic touch. This story of a young immigrate in the rich and opulent north-eastern Italy, could be easily developed into a sociological movie about Italian immigration. Luckily, this never happens. And here it comes the fascinating strangeness of La Sconosciuta , which lies in the traditions of Italian cinema it condensates.