The Unknown

I is another.
— Arthur Rimbaud

With L’Inconnue, Arthur Harari creates one of the most radical and disturbing films on the theme of contemporary identity. Beneath the surface of a metaphysical thriller, the director constructs a true ontology of estrangement: a story in which the self is no longer a stable substance, but a fragile construction constantly threatened by the possibility of being dispossessed of itself.

The film begins with an act that is simultaneously desire, fusion and violence. Sexual intercourse becomes a form of possession, almost an ontological rape: in the encounter with the other, one body survives while an identity succumbs. When David awakens in Eva’s body, we are not simply witnessing a body swap, but an annihilation. Eva’s body becomes David’s new vessel, while the woman’s original identity appears to have been erased, swallowed by a succession of previous appropriations.

The same fate concerns Malia, who, possessed by David, is progressively deprived of the possibility of being recognized as herself. The body remains, but the person disappears. Harari thus pushes a fundamental question to its extreme consequences: what makes a person who they are? The body? Memory? The name? The gaze of others?

The film also introduces the reference to metempsychosis, the transmigration of souls, transforming it into an even more invasive narrative and philosophical device. Traditionally, reincarnation implies spiritual continuity, the survival of an essence beyond the death of the body. Harari overturns this meaning: the migration of the soul does not become a possibility of salvation, but a condemnation to loss.

Every passage from one body to another produces a fracture, a cancellation, a residue of identity that continues to wander without ever finding an origin again. Metempsychosis becomes a labyrinth without a centre: we no longer know who the first subject is and who the final host, who possesses the body and who is instead imprisoned within it.

From here emerges the film’s deepest reflection: does identity truly coincide with the body?

Harari seems to suggest a tragic answer: the self exists only through recognition. It is not enough to affirm “I am”; the world must return that same certainty. Identity is always a relationship with the other, a fragile balance between what we feel ourselves to be and what others see.

If the body does not correspond to one’s perceived identity, if documents, bureaucracy, citizenship, gender, origin, profession or social status deny what a person claims to be, then the subject enters a condition of radical alienation.

L’Inconnue thus becomes a film about the tragedy of failed recognition. It speaks of all those who are not seen for what they are, but for what they represent in the eyes of others. The foreigner, the excluded, the person who does not possess the right document, the right name or the body considered coherent with their identity: all inhabit the same existential territory as Harari’s characters.

The anguish of the film emerges precisely from this impossibility: we may possess an inner reality, but without recognition that possibility risks having no social reality. The subject becomes a wandering body, a consciousness imprisoned within a form that the world interprets differently.

From this perspective, Malia’s extreme gesture acquires a radical force. It is not merely a reaction to personal suffering, but the consequence of an irreparable fracture between being and appearing. When the body, the role and the gaze of others no longer coincide, the individual falls into the hell of alienation.

L’Inconnue enters into dialogue with a long philosophical and literary tradition.

There is Pirandello’s One, No One and One Hundred Thousand, where the individual discovers that they do not possess a single identity, but as many images as there are gazes that define them.

There is Kafka, with his characters trapped within bureaucratic systems and incomprehensible worlds that deny them a fully recognized existence.

There is Borges, with his labyrinths of doubles, mirrors and infinite identities, where the subject loses itself in the multiplication of its own possibilities.

And inevitably there is Bergman and Persona, where the boundary between two identities dissolves until it becomes impossible to distinguish one from the other.

A surprising connection also emerges with the cinema of Babis Makridis, particularly with Miserere / Pity / Oiktos, where the protagonist wears the identity mask of suffering in order to obtain compassion, becoming the emblem of a paradigmatic exchange and of the way the need for recognition from others turns into dependency.

What makes the experience of L’Inconnue even more powerful is an extraordinarily precise formal apparatus. The performances are all excellent, but once again Léa Seydoux delivers a sublime performance: her face becomes the very place of ambiguity, a surface where presence and absence, identity and loss, recognition and disorientation coexist.

Seydoux makes visible the impossibility of coinciding with oneself: the body is no longer merely a vessel, but a territory contested by different memories and consciousnesses.

Harari also constructs a claustrophobic visual universe, made of enclosed spaces, suspended environments and images that seem to imprison the characters. The interiors become metaphors of the soul: places without escape where the subject desperately searches for a form of belonging.

The music contributes to this atmosphere of permanent unease. The soundtrack, beyond an obsessive piano motif, also encounters Erik Satie: it does not simply accompany the narrative, but seems to seep into the images like a foreign presence, creating a sensation of vertigo and oppression. Form and content coincide: the film does not merely tell the story of the loss of identity, it makes the spectator experience it.

A further symbolic layer, perhaps one of the most refined in the film, emerges from the reference to Bob Dylan and the word “unknown”, which runs through the work until the final song.

It is not accidental that the protagonist is named David Zimmerman: a name that recalls Robert Zimmerman, the man who transformed himself into Bob Dylan through a voluntary act of identity rebirth.

If Robert Zimmerman chooses a new name and through this transformation becomes recognized by the world, David Zimmerman experiences the opposite movement: his body is taken away from him, his name no longer corresponds to his presence, and his identity is erased.

Two mirrored trajectories: one transformation chosen, the other suffered.

The reference to Dylan thus opens another labyrinth: does an original identity truly exist, or is every self already a construction, a narrative, a mask through which we ask others to recognize us?

The word “unknown” therefore assumes a philosophical meaning. It does not merely indicate the unknown, but that which resists every definitive definition. The famous line “like a complete unknown” seems to become the secret key to the film: Harari’s characters are individuals who no longer have a stable place in the world, bodies separated from names and consciousnesses separated from the forms they inhabit.

The final song does not close the film, but rather amplifies its enigma. After the migration of souls, the transformation of bodies and the dissolution of identities, only one question remains: if the name, the body and the gaze of others can change, what part of ourselves truly remains ours?

The deepest horror of L’Inconnue is not losing one’s body, but discovering that perhaps we never completely possessed a definitive identity.

The self appears as a fragile construction, a provisional balance between memory, matter and recognition. We are what we believe ourselves to be, but also what others accept to see in us.

In Harari’s labyrinth there is no original centre to return to: there are only bodies passing through other bodies, names searching for meaning, identities born and dying within the gaze of others.

The question “Who am I?” finds no answer because perhaps, at the ultimate depth of existence, it is not a question meant to be solved, but the very mystery that constitutes us.

The Other is not the one I see, but the one who looks at me.
— Emmanuel Levinas