I am reposting this 2014 revue because this remarkable British movie is showing on Film 4 at 1.50 am Monday morning the 30th January, and you may not have seen it. I love it; even if it is one of then most discomforting films I have ever seen.
How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.
I love thee because; Jonathan Glazer and Walter Campbell have adapted Michael Faber’s 2000 novel in ways that make it less explicit and more mysterious and a-literal. You are a true movie, not a filmed novel.
I love thee because; you are beautiful and terrible, evoking curiosity, horror and pity. And do so honestly.
I love thee because; of your audacity, courage, technical brilliance and unending commitment to the task.
I love thee because; you are saying important things. You are about an alien and concerned with alienization. Alienization is a compelling, tragic and horribly topical subject.
I love thee because; you persuaded Scarlett Johansson to undertake what is surely her most demanding role, ever, and made it work, wonderfully.
I love thee because; here a film-star’s glamour is discounted. Human beauty is about truth, not artifice. You are your own thing.
I love thee because; you approach what Alfred Hitchcock called ‘pure cinema’. Everything you have to say to us you show to us by throwing coloured shadows on a wall.
I love thee because; your score is entirely uncommercial. It is organically essential to the film.
I love thee because; you are a humane movie. You move me deeply. And this is not just an intellectual or emotional effect, it offers the possibility of my moving on, myself, of becoming more human.
Let me be more explicit.
This movie is made of images, not words. Most science fiction movies demand exposition. Long long ago in a Galaxy far away…..Even The Man Who Fell to Earth, the film I was most immediately reminded of, explains where and why ‘Thomas Newman’ came from. Under The Skin tells us nothing about its protagonist’s origins or motivation. All we know is that she is alien. But even the alien’s gender is only a persona. We have no idea about ‘its’ real gender, if it has any. We observe what ‘she’ does, but are given no explanations as to why. ‘She’ appears to be preying on young men, but we do not know their actual eventual fate.
This film is beautiful and terrible, evoking curiosity, horror and pity. It never use clichéd cinematic devices to confound or enlighten us, or tricks to shock us. The horror is implicit. It never plays for our sympathy, or colludes and flatters us with irony, and yet I was deeply moved.
A lot of the film takes place as ‘Laura’ (she does use this name at least once) cruises Glasgow in a van, stopping to talk to young men. Many of these encounters were ‘for real’. The van was unmarked and stuffed with hidden mini-cameras that kept recording. A lot of these men had no idea they were being chatted up by a Hollywood Superstar until afterwards. At times there were 9 mini-cameras running simultaneously, giving the cinematographer Daniel Landin, the Editor Paul Watts and the Director hundreds of hours of material to work with, and on. They used much of this cinema verity material, but also sometimes overlaid and montaged it in ways that are beautiful and truly – and here’s a too often misused word – iconic. This is technically innovative and brilliant.
This is a movie about alienation. At one point a TV clip of Tommy Cooper is used wittily, letting us glimpse how alien we must be to an alien. The broad Glaswegian accents used by the males do the same for most English speakers. But this film goes much deeper than that, and this is where its horror and power lie. Outside the cinema we do not have to be aliens to dehumanise and even demonize human beings. How can anyone behead another human being unless they have first discounted their humanity? We might also ask how can anyone target an explosive drone or drop a bomb from 30,000 feet without doing the same thing. It is a truism that modern warfare is too often conducted like a video-game.
But alienation can be countered with empathy. During the film 'Laura' picks up a man suffering from neurofibromatosis, the facial disfigurement often called Elephant Man disease. The actor playing this role is Adam Pearson, a sufferer of this affliction, so no prosthesis was needed. It may be that to alien eyes he looked much like everybody else, but this encounter is pivotal to the plot. Empathy may be essential for our humanity, but it also dangerous – especially to those who feel it.
I wonder what film maker’s pitch was to Ms Johansson.
We’re making this movie, and we want you to play an alien in human disguise, cruising Glasgow, picking up unsuspecting members of the public, whose accents will probably be impenetrable to you, and improvising your responses to them. You will take some of your ‘pick-ups’ home and strip in front of them. You will be naked for a lot of the movie, but your nakedness will not be glamorized or flattering. In fact you may be the most un-erotic femme fatal of all time. You will have hardly any other dialogue. In fact you will say nothing that tells us anything about what you are or why you here. There will be changes within you, but nothing will be said or happen to illustrate them explicitly. Oh, and we do not expect to make a lot of money. In fact we will probably divide audiences and critics sharply.
But maybe Ms Johansson remembered Jonathan Glazer’s previous film Birth, which pivots on a scene where Nicole Kidman’s character is in the audience at a concert. The camera rests on her face for three or four minutes, during which time there is neither action nor words, but as we watch we see her heart and mind change. There is a similar subtle transformation in this movie and Scarlett, like Nicole, rises to the challenge. Her performance is understated, subtle and effective as never before, not even in Lost in Translation. And yet for much of the film we see nothing behind her eyes. When there is a change within her it is minutely signaled, yet has the impact of a Diva’s aria.
In this film a Hollywood actress’s glamour is discounted. She is literally stripped bare and shown exactly as she is. She is transformed by being revealed as a woman, not a star. Not just as a woman, but as the woman she is. What courage this must have taken, fully aware that these images would no doubt be later misused and abused by others in ways over which she has no control. At a time when naked or sexually explicit selfies are embarrassing many celebrities there is a strong message here.
This film reminds me of many other great movies, including of course The Man Who Fell to Earth, but also Repulsion, 2001 and The Tree of Life, and Vertigo, yet it is utterly unique.
That said, in many ways this is a contemporary Hitchcock movie. The psychological use of colour matches Hitch’s, and as I have said it comes close to what he called ‘pure cinema’, with images and actions telling the story, rather than dialogue. Hitch first worked in silent movies first, and Glazer has worked in advertising, creating the arresting images of the white horses melding with the surf for Guinness and irrupting paint fountains for Sony Bravia. I am sure this film would work with no dialogue, just its images and soundtrack. The opening credits echo Saul Bass’s for Vertigo, and there are other links to that movie, in which Kim Novak played two women, one of whom appeared to be dead, the other being a fake. Scarlett also plays two women here, one of whom we presume to be dead, the other we know to be a fake. Two women, one body. Both films are about duplicity. Under the Skin even used (temporary) duplicity in its making, as it invited men to talk to a woman they never suspected was an actress, never mind her being Scarlett Johansson. I don’t know if or what they were paid, but what a story those Glaswegian lads have to tell! No-one would believe them unless they saw the film.
The soundtrack for Under the Skin also reminded me of Bernard Herrmann’s score for Vertigo, as it accompanied the psychological state of the characters. This similarity is not in its orchestration, but in the ways Mica Levi’s score uses acoustic, electronic and electronically distorted natural sounds that act directly on our nervous system and echo the intuitive, almost subconscious, ways in which the images also invade us.
Making Under the Skin relied on Scarlett Johansson’s ability to improvise in real conversations. Hitch did not allow improvisation, he already had the script and movie completed in his head before he began to shoot it, but he did give the actors he trusted room to play their characters according to their instincts. He told Kim Novak I will tell you what to wear, where to stand and what to say, but how you do these things is up to you. That is why I contracted you.
Under The Skin is Hitchcockian in many ways, but Hitchcock never approached the seriousness or courage of this movie, and never showed such compassion. Do not be misled by the word compassion. It does not mean sentimentality. This is a very hard movie to watch. I have often said that movies can help humanize us by allowing us to step into another person’s shoes for a mile or an hour. Sometimes those shoes hurt.
As Matt Zoller Seitz has written of this film, on the site that still bears Roger Ebert’s revered name and seeks to continue his critical tradition, saying;
"Here is an experience that's nothing like yours, and here are some images and sounds and situations that capture the essence of what the experience felt like; watch the movie for a couple of hours, and when it's over, go home and think about what you saw and what it did to you."
That is what I have done, and been doing, and I think I will continue to do for some time. Sometimes a movie inhabits us, gets truly under our skin. In this case I think that is a good thing.
