May el-Toukhy’s ‘Woman Unknown’ Wins the Golden Lion at Venice — Surprise!

Off to a TIFF screening — Venice 83 winners below, jury drama to follow. The short version circulating online: "Woman Unknown" was a compromise. The jury deadlocked over "Possible Love" and "NAZA," not able to com to terms, fell back on their #3, May el-Toukhy's film — from the only female director in competition. Go figure. More to come ..

Golden Lion “Woman Unknown” (May el-Toukhy)

Silver Lion “Possible Love” (Lee Chang-dong)

Best Director Ilya Khrzhanovsky (“DAU”)

Special Jury Prize “NAZA” (Rachel Szor/Yuval Abraham)

Best Actor: John Malkovich (Wild Horse Nine)

Best Actress Mathilde Arcel (“Woman Unknown”)

Best Screenplay Stéphane Brizé (“A Good Little Soldier)

UPDATE: I saw 15 of the 21 films in competition this year — I would have seen all of them if I didn't have to go to TIFF. 'Woman Unknown' is middle of the pack. It's a bleak, elegantly controlled postwar Danish drama-thriller that channels the paranoid atmosphere of Hitchcock's "Rebecca."

Mathilde Arcel — who won best actress — is excellent as Marie, a woman whose wartime past threatens the carefully constructed life she has built while working as a nanny in a widower's home. The main issue I had with the film is that the symbolism and psychodrama become overly obvious in the final stretch, but it's still honestly far better than many of the films competing for the Golden Lion.

There are whispers, rumors, that juror Kaouther Ben Hania, who was in Venice competition last year for her Gaza-set movie "The Voice of Hind Rajab," threw a fit when she started to realize "NAZA" would only be getting a "special jury prize." Whether she's the one who ultimately blocked Lee Chang-dong's "Possible Love" — my pick for best of the comp — from winning the top prize is a mystery.

No surprise, John Malkovich won best actor for "Wild Horse Nine" — he's destined for Oscar contention. Malkovich brings an easygoing, almost cowboy-like charm to his character, a CIA agent on his last legs. It might be the performance of his career.

Reliable French filmmaker Stéphane Brizé, known for his blue-collar stories, won best screenplay for "A Good Little Soldier," which I will be seeing in Toronto on Wednesday. Russian dissident Ilya Khrzhanovsky won best director for "DAU," a film more fascinating for how it was made than for the result that appears on the screen.