Jonathan Glazer 2013 UK/USA
Starring: Scarlett Johansson, Adam Pearson, Paul Brannigan, Jeremy McWilliams, D Meade, Lynsey Taylor Mackay
*SPOILER ALERT*
It's very rare these days to happen upon a film without a bad review to its name so to even think of one with rave reviews that never drop below enthusiastic worship across the board is an extraordinary occasion. Strangely though that's the case with Under The Skin, a disturbing, beautiful, delirious and genuinely innovative cacophony of darkness, light, human (and alien) emotion and exploration directed by Jonathan Glazer of Sexy Beast fame, with a unsettling, rattling score by Mica Levi of Micachu And The Shapes and starring Scarlett Johansson. Although this isn't Scarlett Johansson as you may know her, it's Scarlett Johansson deglamourized from a movie star to an everyday person on the street. I'd say that she's also desexualized but it's more that she's completely unaware of her own and everyone else's sexuality, as if she's been instructed on what will entice men but hasn't questioned what they want with her or even considered the body she's been given. It's an issue that comes up later when, during a sexual encounter more about curiosity than attraction with a man who has been kind to her, she lets herself be undressed and caressed before suddenly springing violently up and examining her vagina closely with a lamp. Oh, and she's an alien. The first time she appears, in just one of a veritable banquet of blank voids, we don't even see her face as she takes the clothes (and presumably the identity) of a dead woman, only outlines. The dark messy bob, the movement of her hands, the groove at the crest of her buttocks, her pendulous breasts. Her real form (if indeed it is the actual form) is only revealed in the terrifying finale as she peels off her face and gazes longingly into the still-blinking eyes. When, while still in her human disguise, she then moves into our world she's both unrecognizable and familiar, beautiful but ordinary, inviting but oddly passive, there but somehow not. During her journey (her origins are never revealed) she shows kindness, fear, flirtatiousness and, in an incredible scene opposite a deformed man, uncommon tenderness seducing him purely by treating him as she does others. In return she's faced with the same from people she meets. Some are lonely, some are lusty, some are volatile and brutal and some speak in strong accents that are almost like an alien language (both to her and to us). Her only mission appears to be to trawl the city for men, attract their attention, lure them back to her place (another void, this time inside a house) and guide them willingly into a reflective, viscous quicksand. Entranced and possibly hypnotised they don't even realise what's happening even as they go neck deep. Later we follow one of the victims and see him in a sort of suspended animation encountering the now shrivelled previous pick-up right before he bumps into an invisible wall with an ear-piercing tinny clang and is sucked from his skin leaving a silken outer casing drifting in the liquid, the juice draining away towards a light. In the second half of the film the unnamed alien rebels against her elders (only shown as an unidentified motorbike-riding man who may be another alien in a borrowed shell) and starts to wonder about feelings and emotion, what it means to touch, feel and experience. Here, Johansson is at a career best, her outsider petrified and inert like a trauma victim stuffed with sawdust, embarking on a flight of steps like a spider on a hotplate, contemplating food with disgust, a small finger tap to a song on the radio her own version of the joyous release of the final dance of Beau Travail. Honestly I don't know if anything I've said can really explain or even describe Glazer's world, the only film that even gets close in terms of a comparison is Gaspar Noé's Enter The Void although Noé's kaleidoscopic visual cruelty is almost certainly aimed at the audience and created for his own amusement. Glazer's is equally shadowy (and paradoxically full of almost blinding colours colliding) and full of discord but altogether more humane (even if its central character isn't human) and questioning of the way we live, act and relate to one another, how we hide away and throw ourselves forward. Often what we see is from the point of view of the alien, her experiences becoming our experiences, but at other times it's showing her melding with her environment or a star-like explosion or the white of an eye. Much has been made of the unusual approach to the street scenes - filmed clandestinely via concealed cameras and featuring Johansson communicating and flirting with real people unaware of her role, that she’s Scarlett Johansson and the fact that they're being filmed - and where the lines of distinction between acting and reality lay. Glazer doesn't give any clues, only crediting a handful of the participants, and at times, particularly in the scenes with the deformed man, one has to wonder about the treatment of the people involved and where the point between creativity and exploitation lies. Either way it works, creating an aura of uncertainty about your average person and ending up with a perhaps unintended but unavoidable amount of product placement which could have paid for the film a couple of times over (and making me personally even more nervous than normal about the other people in the cinema). It only risks falling down in one slightly heavy-handed scene featuring a bloody rose. Calling it a masterpiece as some have may be a little bit of a overstatement but it's unquestionably one of the top three films I've seen this year so far.
No comments:
Post a Comment