Saturday, August 9, 2014

Bangbus U.K. is different


UNDER THE SKIN

Mood and visuals attempt to replace imagination and narrative in this piece of throwback science fiction.  ("Throwback" is a double entendre, in case you weren't sure.)

2014
Directed by Jonathan Glazer
Written by Walter Campbell and Jonathan Glazer (based on the novel by Michael Faber)
With Scarlett Johansson (Samantha)

Spoiler alert: moderate, but this is a largely meaningless category

"You can't show an alien entity, but you can allude to it," Jonathan Glazer says in the anemic featurettes offered on Under the Skin's home video release.  It turns out that if you but marry an undeniable filmmaking prowess to this shitty, lackadaisical attitude, you shall be heaped with praise, rather than doomed to languish in obscurity until such time as Joel and the Bots are forced to view your efforts, only to conclude that "[you] just didn't care."  Everybody wants to be 2001, nobody succeeds, and nobody succeeds less than Under the Skin, its ambition demonstrated with a brick-to-the-face subtle opening homage.  Unfortunately, its oblique and mysterious style really does have a lot more in common with MST3K fare than it does Kubrick, except inperhaps fittinglythe shallowest of ways.

The most striking of the disc's featurettes isn't Glazer's, but the one focusing on Chris Oddy, Skin's production designer (what can I say? of course I watched this one first).  It would be a mean-spirited oversight to skip praising him for his obvious talent.  His pre-Skin work is tantamount to "nothing," and for a guy with little but uncredited odd jobs on his resume, he's really triumphed here.  Skin, for all that it is principally a collection of well-photographed boring places in Scotland, has its moments of impeccably great and deceptively difficult minimalist set design, particularly an endless expanse of darkness with a reflective black floor and an invisible pit in the center.  Oddy describes it with the perfectly icky term "meniscus floor," though all this says is that he doesn't know what a "meniscus" is.  In the film, anyway, it's a hole full of black liquid that swallows the unwary.  Whatever this idea represents in terms of narrative or theme, it didn't take a medical dictionary to execute, and Oddy did so with extreme style.

Of course being a production designer also involves more prosaic duties, especially if you're a production designer on Under the Skin.  Oddy was tasked with finding appropriately dilapidated shithouses in Glasgow but he remarks, with good humor, that it was more difficult than he anticipated, since they were either occupied and in too good a state of repair for his purposes, or they were so run-down and awful that no one in their right mind would be fooled into following a woman into them, even if they were presumably going to have casual sex with her.  It just wouldn't be believable.

The reason this is either funny or horrifying, depending on your point of view, is that I can't imagine he had possibly seen the finished product when he said this: for if believability was ever a watchword on the Under the Skin shoot, it is one of the greatest cinematic failures I've ever witnessed.

I don't think it was, and therefore it isn't, but if you approach film with any degree of literalism this is not the movie for you.  Also if you like to be told a story.  Also if you are annoyed by hollow pretension.

As is so well-known by now I felt comfortable burying the lede and alluding to it without set-up a few paragraphs ago, Under the Skin is the movie where an alien, or at least some kind of alien instrumentality, comes to Earth, and takes the form of Scarlett Johannson in order to pick up human men.  Her method is to drive around in a creepy van, ask creepy questions, and buckle and unbuckle her seatbelt several times per scene (this film is approximately 50% buckle-related).  She is assisted in this endeavor by a motorcycle-riding helper, who is just a huge fucking waste of my attention span.  As a literal sexual predator, her end goal is to lure men into the various lairs that her helper has established across Scotland, at which point they are swallowed up by the black goo, and over time their bodies are analyzed, processed, and digested, or something.

If the premise of an alien invader stalking the streets in a lousy van reminds you of Prince of Space, then it means you're like me, and God help you.  But if this is the tragic case, I'll bet that my relation of the "plot" could not help but to instill within you, thou connoisseur of crap, the unpleasant but accurate notion that Skin is a remake of The Creeping Terror.  However, I think there might be more spoken dialogue in Terror, a film infamous for having most of its original audio lost; meanwhile, the gross sexual fetishism inherent to the original is now made unmissable text.  The 1964 anti-classic also has a memorable monster, rather than a chavved-up Scarlett Johansson determinedly not blinking at things.

At interminable length, Skin is also a remake of every movie where an alien learns humanity, for the predator was made in our image too well.  Eventually she approaches some kind of empathy for her prey, though I have no idea how or why.

Because fuck you, that's why.

Actually, I have some vague intuition as to why.  In the film's one truly compelling scene, where that compulsion is not dictated by a demand from Glazer to "hey, look at this cool 70s-esque shit!", the predator picks up her newest mark, a poor fellow suffering from a problem that would ordinarily impact his attractiveness.

He is portrayed by Alan Pearson, actual sufferer of neurofibromatosis type 1, a condition I have absolutely no desire to discuss.  He is one of the film's bevy of non-actors, though the only one I give a damn about, and the positive effect Skin has had on his life arguably justifies the thing's existence.  Ultimately, his scene does not, though it is the very centerpiece of the film and comes the closest to signalling its intent to observe humanity through the eyes of an intentionally inscrutable alien.  Since the predator is not actually interested in fucking him, his condition doesn't matter to her, and like so many others and presumably against his better judgment, he gets in her van based on the implied promise of candy.  It is heartbreaking and terrifying and nasty, and I honestly love how the sequence begins.

And this brings us to the Spot the Allegory portion of today's show.  Skin is so frustratingly unwilling to attach definite meaning to anything that it becomes a collage of symbols, a feature-length exercise in Glazer congratulating himself upon looking at humanity through an objective lens, communicating so little that anything you think Skin actually has to say about life is, in the end, just what you have to say about life.  (It's totally deep, I'm sure.)

How many readings can we draw?  Well, there's the idea that human society is so shallow that only the skin itself really matters, which is why the predator can move through us without detection and with a great deal of success.  There's the idea that women, in particular, have their power (and vulnerability) bound up almost exclusively in their physical appearance.  I guess there's also the idea that women are vapid machines that will make you want them and then drop you into a depthless black void, emotionally speaking?

I think they accidentally included the idea that aliens don't want to eat, and hence women/humans don't want to fuck, someone with a genetic disorder, let alone an autosomally dominant one.  Oh, and of course there's the unavoidable proposition that men are so incredibly stupid that they will get into a van with a stranger who clearly means them harm, so long as she looks like Scarlett Johansson.  Naturally, this leads into more meta territory, and one supposes that Skin is exploring the concept of celebrity, and perhaps, through Johansson, the concept of the female image itself.

Whoopty-shit.

Johansson, I've said, is a pretty great actor.  Despite the atrocious physical business Glazer gives her by way of seatbelts and not blinkingthe laziest index for "inhuman" there ever wasit's nonetheless an excellent performance.  Johansson is as captivating as anyone could be with the void she was given.  She has a predator's eyes for the first phase of Skin, a way of looking at things and seeming to process them that is entirely focused on her grim task.

It's been said that Skin is interesting in that it's the movie where everyone's favorite hot lady gets naked but only in the most unsexy of ways; I think they may've missed the scene where she examines herself in the mirror, lit only by the space heater, and seems to come to understand in a very distant way the reason this skin has appeal.  (And if I've mentioned the blinking twice, it's only because I'm annoyed all out of proportion to its importance by the fact that the aliens were able to create a person suit so well-designed for arousal that they bothered to shave its legs, armpits, and pussy but could not be troubled to accurately replicate so basic, necessary, and upfront a human function as appropriately closing its eyes at regular intervals.)

The pity of Johansson is that she doesn't seem to be able to distinguish between good and bad science fiction, since out of the other three she's done in the past year, only one has actually been any good, while the remaining two have ranged from passably mediocre to downright garbage.  This one edges toward the latter; it's only that solid performance by Johansson rather than the slack crap she gave us in Lucy, along with the occasional far-out image offered by Glazer and Oddy, that keep Skin from sinking body and soul into that deep, dank pit.

On the other hand, I'm pretty much alone in thinking all of her last three movies sucked, so kudos to her on finding her way into some kind of zeitgeist.

For my part, I started compulsively talking back to the screen at a point not much more than halfway through; it's only too bad that my own improvised witticisms wouldn't have gotten me through an episode on the Satellite of Love, though in fairness they rarely had material so quietly dull to work against.  I reluctantly suppose that this must be a square's impression of Under the Skin.  But, hey, someone needs to speak for us too.

Score:  3/10

2 comments:

  1. I clicked on that "sex is terrifying" tag at the bottom. Talk about leading me into the rabbit hole.
    I haven't seen this movie yet (and I'm not sure I will, according to your review), but I dig the MST3K references like no other. It's usually difficult for me to fully appreciate reviews for movies I haven't seen (which, I guess, goes against the entire point but whatever), but this one was a real treat.

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    1. "I clicked on that "sex is terrifying" tag at the bottom. Talk about leading me into the rabbit hole."

      Categorization tool or products liability warning? You decide!

      "(which, I guess, goes against the entire point but whatever)"

      I've always found it's a lot more fun to read about a movie afterward myself. It helps shift the discussion from "how it works (or doesn't)" to "if it works," which is usually more fruitful. But I try to conceive of reviews as an entertainment in their own right, which is why I make dumb jokes.

      I'm glad you enjoyed--fwiw, Tim Brayton (along with a lot of other folsk) absolutely loved it. It's a little dismissive to say, but if you legitimately like art crap, it's still better than, say, Weekend.

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