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)

Life after war : Sixteen (2013) at Bath Film Festival

This is a Festival review of Sixteen (2013), as seen at Bath Film Festival 2013 (@BathFilm)

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

2 December

This is a Festival review of Sixteen (2013), as seen at Bath Film Festival 2013 (@BathFilm) [and thanks to a complimentary ticket from the festival]

95 = S : 16 / A : 16 / C : 15 / M : 17 / P : 16 / F : 15

A rating and review of Sixteen (2013)

S = script

A = acting

C = cinematography

M = music

P = pacing

F = feel

9 = mid-point of scale (all scored out of 17, 17 x 6 = 102)


Wrongly, Sixteen (2013)* felt like it might be just too many things jostling for screen-time, which usefully put one edge – as to whether the enterprise would succeed – in the way that Jumah (Roger Nsengiyumva) must feel, and which John Bowen’s effective score accentuates (more on that later), for we have :

* A love story

* A child soldier from Congo (who, as with many who have been in conflicts, probably has something like post-traumatic stress disorder (or PTSD))

* The love between a mother and her adoptive son

* Petty crime that has got out of hand

* Reaching a time (the sixteen of the title) when the future has to be considered

* Fighting one’s own battles


I swear that these do all fit together, and the unifying force is that soundtrack, which – as I put it in the Q&A – moves from disturbingly menacing to uncertain to sensual, when Jumah is asked to give his girlfriend Chloe (Rosie Day) a haircut, and back again, and which has an otherworldly quality to it : writer / director Rob Brown, who has worked with Bowen before, said that what he was after with scoring the edit was understood by Bowen, but that a sound such as that of Brian Eno and others had been mentioned. (I also heard Peter Gabriel's sort of open chords.)

In my opinion, the score tautened one’s awareness of the past that Jumah brings with him, and fed a sense of how he must be feeling into what we saw – someone being attacked might have one resonance (in, say, a film like Witness (1985)), but here we were aware (from sources such as War Witch (2012)) of the brutalizing world in which he had been forced to live. Except with very low-frequency growling, it did not mask its presence, and it partly distanced us from the early shock of some events, just as Jumah might have been in situation but not wholly present in them.

This sort of character was what Brown said that he had been aiming at, and which had drawn him in other film projects, effectively someone who had certain experiences and for whom living is difficult. As a foil to him, Day’s portrayal of Chloe was perfect – one sensed that, beneath her confidence, she did, as she told Jumah, want to be helped to feel positive about herself, and that she, if she can be helped in return, has resources of trust and validation that can help him heal.

Above these two, Rachael Stirling, as Jumah’s mum Laura, acted exceptionally well how she sought to bear with him, from the moment when she comes into his bedroom and Chloe and he are resting in each other’s arms to wanting to hold him back, and not knowing what he might do : that moment when he decides who he is and what he wants feels so unstable, and we cut away to her with no certainty what might happen.

The atmosphere of the film, with this excellent score, is electric, and one even feels that, as with War Witch’s title-character Komona, there may be some sixth sense in play for Jumah to be in the right place several times. This is not an easy ride much of the time, but that tactile quality of the hair, and all the feeling that comes from the other great film with that theme, Patrice Leconte’s The Hairdresser’s Husband (Le mari de la coiffeuse) (1990), plus the tenderness between Chloe and Jumah, soften it sufficiently.


End-notes

* There are two films this year with that title, so IMDb designates this Sixteen (I) (2013).


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