Cannes 2026: Léa Seydoux, the beautiful and strange Unknown by Harari (review)
With this adaptation of the comic strip co-written with his brother, Arthur Harari creates a melancholy drama about a confusion of identity. As strange as it is airtight.
There are films which immediately impose their implacable logic and offer themselves to spectators as the resolution of an equation without unknowns. Others, on the contrary, search, dig, dodge, as the story unfolds. In both cases, the trap can close on them. Cinema thrives on intuitions as much as it does on mysteries. Arthur Harari’s new film is located right in the middle of these two poles. The mathematical staging is thus based on a very structured construction in the service of a totally crazy story. From this tension a striking strangeness can arise.
David Zimmerman (Niels Schnieder), a puny and lonely photographer, meets a beautiful stranger, Eva (Léa Seydoux), during a party. Without saying a word to each other, they isolate themselves from the madding crowd and make love. Fusion of bodies, shared orgasm. The next day David wakes up in Eva’s body. This masculine becoming feminine forces David to go looking for his partner to regain his lost appearance.
Harari is part of a cinephile mythology which would go from The Pier has Double Bodysuit passing through Vertigo Or Blow Up. A self-reflective cinema where the “I” is necessarily “other” since it belongs to the very vortex of the film inhabited by specters. Images and sounds no longer provide proof of any reality but reflect on a possible truth of bodies through incarnation.
The confusion and astonishment generated by David’s mutation partially blocks the full expression of feelings. Hence this uncomfortable feeling of being stuck in a labyrinth where the wanderer, lost, would tirelessly return to the same places, dwelling on his misfortune. Looking for a way out leads to trial and error. We have rarely felt such great melancholy of existence. Seydoux and Schneider spread this same anxious fever, contaminate each other…
The plot, of which nothing will be revealed, will even become a little more complex, adding a layer to this physical and mental dispossession. Beautiful vertigo. Niels Schneider, straight hair and careful gestures, looks like a Bressonian romantic hero from Devil probably or Four nights of a dreamer. Léa Seydoux only looks like herself, generating her own strength. Bluffing.
But by choosing to completely isolate his characters from the world around them, and thus to exclude any distanced point of view, Harari finds himself trapped in a purely mental and theoretical apprehension. The rare attempts at dialogue with the outside world fail to produce anything other than incomprehension and emotional neutrality. And it is perhaps no coincidence that the only sequence that fully functions in this area is thought of as a fantasy.
This is where something goes wrong. The interweaving of fantasy and naturalism struggles to come together. Like the faces of Eva and David, which by force of circumstances have become impenetrable masks, ineffective in resolving the insoluble equation of their own mystery. The story gradually became a system.
France. By Arthur Harari. With: Léa Seydoux, Niels Schneider, Victoire Du Bois… Duration: 2h20. Released August 26
