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)

Images pierce our consciousness

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2012
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

24 June

Piercing Brightness (2013) gives a leading role to Preston, known, amongst other things, as a railway interchange in Lancashire. Another two things that it is apparently known for is the largest population or density of Chinese people in the UK, and, probably unrelatedly, the highest incidence of reported UFOs. (I hesitate to suggest that the link may be that the former group give rise to the high number of sightings, but many an inferred causality has been based on as slender findings.)

Sufficient reason, one may suppose, to set a film concerned with extra-terrestrial life in this city. The resultant photography, around Preston’s buildings and in its natural environment, was strikingly beautiful, both in themselves and as suggestive of connections that were later made more evident. To be honest, too evident, and that mystery and beauty was swept aside in favour of a Doctor-Who-type plot-line and a race to the finish whose inexplicability could only be grounds for suspecting an opening for a sequel.

Though, honestly, they can spare their breath on selling us another one, as even a paper-thin rationale would not have us believe that an exploratory force on Earth would just have contented itself with knowing all about Lancashire, even if it did first arrive there, and then some members of that ‘Glorious 100’ (a bit too much as if something from Blake’s Seven ?) was assimilated in the population by having the facility to choose a human identity (and so, perhaps, become too enmeshed in Earth life (Park Life ?)).

If I wanted value for money from such a force, tasked with some nebulous aim of helping humankind evolve, I don’t think that I’d be content for them to ignore the rest of the planet and seek to achieve it from a former mill-town. Glorious 100, camped out in Preston when there is a world of culture and of forms of life, seems a bit like a rather feeble ill-thought-out given.

For, despite the words and images that we heard at a – forbidden – assembly of some of the hundred, nothing plausible was offered in explanation, when this was supposed to be the participants navel-gazing at what had become of their mission, when the obvious heckle would have been ‘Shouldn’t have started wearing clogs and keeping a whippet’ (with all due apologies for using that regional stereotype !)

When the plot was kept from being real, i.e. not riddled with the ‘Four thousand holes’ that The Beatles located nearby (in ‘A Day in the Life’), the film worked, with, for example, the curious pair in white (Jiang and Shin) rescued from being laughable as they strode across the square by the ever-circling presence of the hooded bikers, or their room, when they are first hosted by Naseer (, being whited out in an unnatural way. Sadly, maintaining intrigue was not part of Shezad Dawood’s purpose.

No, for it was for the gods from Mount Olympus to show their feet of clay by smoking, drinking, and, by smoking indoors, getting slung out. Slung out of a club that, if it had needed as many men on the door, might have had evidence of more than a smattering of fellow clubbers – unless this is deep social commentary on poverty and austerity, but that still doesn’t explain why a club would pay for a disproportionate level of security.

When this film tried too hard, with Chen Ko as Jiang swaggering or downing a large cocktail in one, one just engaged the thinking ‘This isn’t going to go well’, but did not really care, and, even then, not much happened, except his being the worse for wear. Likewise, when Warner (Paul Leonard) is chasing after Naseer with Maggie (Tracy Brabin) in the car, the pursuit is immaterial, because one does not know what he is seeking (or seeking to avoid).

And then, whether it was the aspect ratio of the copy or the projection, there was the issue with seeing the sub-titles, which first of all made it seem as if our duo was uttering the equivalent of figures to each other, and so it did not seem to matter what they were saying, whereas, when the first sub-title spanned two lines, the top line was legible – and earnest, but banal, in the way that seems to typify the communication of alien beings after the original Star Trek series. Jennifer Lim (Shin) did her best to invest her role with the moody character of a Servalan, but the trite nature of the dialogue, when looks were subverted by words, did for that pretence.

As the almost ever-present menace, though, the hooded bikers, because a purely visual element, provided tension and atmosphere, which scenes of Maggie and her colleague stumbling through thickets failed to deliver: ironically, the alien life, which – we were told at one point – had become so adapted to Earth that it had lost its true nature, is more striking when it just seems to be local youth amusing itself, whereas the scenes of supposed sightings lacked impact and any intensity.

At this level, the film did play with the question of whether we would recognize life from another world, if we saw it. However, Dawood and his writer Kirk Lake did so, generally, in a very clunky way, which made it seem to be trying no harder than Woody Allen’s Sleeper (1973) in creating a futuristic world with which we are meant to engage:

In fact, take that back, because, in that early film, Allen and his collaborator Marshall Brickman have two outstanding inventive conceits in the orb and the orgasmatron, not to mention the automated operating-theatre, the hilarious spooling scene, the equally hilarious scene with the inflatable suit, and Allen himself masquerading as a domestic robot, and baulking when he finds out what happens at the mender’s...

If Piercing Brightness had had a tenth of that energy in the plot, characterization and dialogue to equal the strong visuals, it could have been immeasurably better and matched its opening promise !



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