Woman Unknown: May el-Toukhy Just Won Everything

By Dua Mifsud

There are festivals and there are verdicts, and the 83rd Venice International Film Festival just delivered one of those verdicts that makes you sit back and think: yes, that is exactly right. May el-Toukhy's *Woman Unknown* took the Golden Lion. Mathilde Arcel took Best Actress by implication — the kind of performance where the prize feels like paperwork, not discovery. John Malkovich took Best Actor, which is the universe correcting a long-running administrative error. The room at the Lido apparently knew what it was watching. That doesn't always happen.

Meanwhile, TIFF is doing what TIFF does — assembling the other half of the awards season argument. *I Play Rocky* is the crowd-pleaser that critics pretend not to need until they do: Anthony Ippolito playing a man playing an icon, the kind of performance that becomes a meme before it becomes a trophy, and then becomes both. The Peter Farrelly *Green Book* comparison is being floated, which is either a compliment or a warning depending on your position, but the audience response is the kind you can't manufacture with a trailer.

Chris Rock's *Misty Green* is the thing I keep coming back to. A director best known for standing up being the sharpest observer in the room about Hollywood's grinding machinery — with Rosalind Eleazar apparently turning in a performance so precise it makes the whole thing feel inevitable. Adam Driver. Daniel Kaluuya. Rock himself. That ensemble on paper reads like a dare. On screen, apparently, it lands. The Hollywood hustle portrait is a crowded genre and most entries in it are made by people who want credit for their suffering rather than insight into the system. Rock, who has been chewed up by the machine publicly and survived it publicly, might actually have something real to say.

Jodie Comer and Harry Melling in *Stuffed*, the macabre TIFF musical — I want to love this more than the reviews are letting me. Live-action original screen musicals are rare enough to deserve encouragement, and those two have the range. But "comes apart at the seams" is doing real work in that headline and I believe it.

The documentary that matters this season is *NAZA* — Israeli directors Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor, Jonathan Glazer as executive producer, The Guardian as producer, and a Venice special jury prize for a film about the IDF's war in Gaza. That is not a film that arrives quietly. That is a film that arrives and then the room has to decide what to do with the silence.

May el-Toukhy won the Golden Lion. Write that down. Award season has a name at the top now.