Do you think I'm pretty ?

This is a review of Under the Skin (2013)

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2014
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

This is a review of Under the Skin (2013)

Rather unlikely though it may seem in retrospect, Tilda Swinton appeared as four characters in a film where a central tenet is that one or more of three genetically engineered ‘sisters’ needs to engage in sexual activity to collect semen to keep them all alive. Teknolust (2002) really is not much better than described, because it leaves nothing to the viewer’s imagination, and does one much care whether Ruby, Olive and Marine perish (let alone whether semen denatures if, as here, heated in a vessel) ?

In Under the Skin (2013), the danger, if anything, is of obscuring the novelistic source-material in a film that is visually very sharp and concerns quiet contemplation, allowing the eye to acclimatize to what is in the shot : a wide view, with, one realizes, Scarlett Johansson (Laura ?*) walking along the road in the middle ground; an assembly of images, faces, gestures in Glasgow that becomes a golden kaleidoscope; looking into the darkness, and seeing that a figure is coming out from it; the fog and what comes in and out of view in it. At one point, the raging of the sea, and people's impotence in the face of it.


At times, #UndertheSkin is unnervingly stylized, like ritual, at others observational of nature, and human nature, in an unassuming way.
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) March 19, 2014

In an opening sequence, complete with acute musical accompaniment composed by Mica Levi, we are given a sense of the genesis of Laura's character, centring on the iris, but, even then, we cannot be quite sure what we see - nothing to do with the quality, for that uncertainty is quite intentional. The film does not really have a narrative, but a structure, and it deliberately leaves the meaning of quite a bit of what we see unclear. In particular, Laura seems to collaborate with more than one bike-rider, who, as she does in her van**, roam the territory (they almost always seem to be seen at night, as is Laura for much of the film), but what the connection is and what purpose it serves no one could ever say.

It is a fine line to tread between telling too much story (Piercing Brightness (2013)) and ending up crass, and not telling enough (and, inevitably, losing some of the audience), and, although Skin is close to the latter, as the film develops, we are running through the possibilities in our minds, and it gives us quite a mental workout (even if, as said, some of those matters are ultimately going to be a matter of our deciding what was going on, and why : perhaps this is some kind of hive, with Laura as the queen, and the men as drones ?).

#UnderTheSkin #Win Hypervisual predatory identification @StudioCanalUK @picturehouses
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) March 16, 2014

Just when Skin seems to be in danger of having become repetitive, with variations on a theme, it is careful to deviate from what we have seen before - at first, still at its pace and nothing dramatic, although, in such terms and on all sorts of levels, the ending is a shock, not just because we have started to care about Laura when she resembles a black widow spider less. Moving to being less in control, we forget even that the famous face is that of an actress, and think of Johansson as a woman, no longer predating.

All in all, as Edgar Allan Poe would not, nothing to stretch the boundaries too far, an interesting journey, and some devastatingly impressive images.


Postscript

A somewhat spoilery review from Mark Kermode (in The Observer) is quite interesting


End-notes

* Apparently (according to IMDb, she (her name is never heard) is called Laura (which may have been taken from the book, as may the fact that she is English, as Johansson perfectly sounds).

** The same IMDb entry asserts that hidden cameras captured the men who get into the van, who were not actors, and director Jonathan Glazer only told them afterwards about the film. Equally, it describes the film as An alien seductress preys upon hitchhikers in Scotland whereas being asked for directions or walking to the local shop is hardly hitching...


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Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)

Let the little children... : A write-up of Poor Kids (2011) and an Arts Picturehouse Q&A

This is a review of Poor Kids (2011) [Made for t.v. ?]

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2013
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

15 October

This is a review of Poor Kids (2011) [Made for t.v. ?]

I had not seen Poor Kids on t.v. Around 100 of us watched, felt, feared. Sad that the Q&A host at @CamPicturehouse didn't ask a filmic Q...
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) October 15, 2013

Not every statistic in this film – there are numerous quoted, many of them quite shocking – is stencilled onto a wall for us to read (the writing is literally on the wall), but those that are actually appeared to be, to judge from a long, angled shot, which leaves two children playing beneath it :

How take in that one in six children in poor families have thought of suicide, for example, or the effects on asthma and other conditions, or on mortality, of living in poor housing ?

We took it in more easily through the eyes, and prematurely wise words*, of Paige, living in a horribly damp apartment that, rightly, we see demolished, condemning the high-rise solution, and, as Paige tells us, the dust carried as far as Argos. We see how she has trimmed the blind, affected by mould, and hear from her how humiliating it is, even though she keeps clothes away from the window, to be told that she smells of it. She is a sensitive girl, adapted to these hard ways of living, and we can see her joy when her mother is given a property half-an-hour away, out of the Gorbals. Seeing her playing in the snow in their garden gives us hope.

The most shocking thing is how these children have to take on financial constraints. One subject, who had eczema on her legs (until repeated applications of cream cured her), chillingly told us, in a throw-away remark, how she had picked her legs until they bled as a way of feeling a sense of release. Self-harm is little understood in society, least of all that there are various, very different reasons, why people harm themselves, not all related to harming in itself – some, who feel numb, do it to feel something, whereas someone else might, through feeling in control (even only of what he or she is doing to her body), balance the sense that everything else is beyond their power.

Sam’s sister Kaylie (?) also told us, I think, that she had attempted suicide, and had suicidal thoughts. Although Sam was the subject in her family (in Leicester), we could see through Sam and her (Sam had to wear his sister’s blouse as a shirt (and her blazer) for school, and that was hardly going to go unnoticed) how they sought to support and understand the pressures on their out-of-work father, including the fact that Child Benefit for her had wrongly been stopped, and he was having to survive until the mistake got remedied. We saw him produce meals for them to eat that looked very nice, but which he said that cost almost for ingredients.

Empty fridges, children going without lunch, or having to be put onto free school meals, and meters for electricity or even t.v. – these things were the stuff of the lives that these children (and their parents) had allowed us to look into. And, as film-maker Jezza Neumann was at pains to point out in the Q&A, this film, had been made for t.v. two years ago, and yet people were still watching it – not a world that suddenly came into existence with The Coalition, but carrying over from the Brown years, and those of Blair before.

We were told that, not surprisingly after the screening, Sam had some two hundred donations of school uniform (and a vicar donated to set up a second-hand uniform facility), Page (I think that it was Page) an offer of riding lessons (she had wanted to try), and numerous other kindnesses from people whom the film had touched. Neumann’s take was that, when areas become those where the poor live, and no one is in any better position than anyone else to help a neighbour, that kindness cannot operate so easily as it might have done, when someone lost a job, and those near them could tide them over.

The film is extremely well made, and Neumann told us how those who had seen it in the States, prior to making the US version, had been through it almost frame by frame, before reporting that they had been unable to see how he had prompted these words from the featured children - he said that the only way to make such a film is to be honest, and that he had known, with Page’s mother, that people would query her apparently manicured nails, whereas she had cut them from Coke cans and superglued them on.

The snobbery between cinema and t.v. films apart, this film conveys its message effectively, economically, and with an emotional force.

We are still where we were, and worse, with Poor Kids (2011)...https://t.co/atiycAeQtahttps://t.co/8IomNOagED

— THE AGENT APSLEY #ScrapUniversalCredit #JC4PM2019 (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) August 8, 2019

End-notes

* We hear children, in this film, troubled with adult concerns, such as debt, how their presents can be afforded


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Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)