Under The Skin (2013)

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Dir. Jonathan Glazer

I find myself seemingly disappointed with current cinema when yet I've seen plenty of great films being made within the last few years, regardless of debating whether any of it is canon worthy material. It doesn't have anything to do with the issues of celluloid film against digital cameras that are currently of debate - its only a concern for me in preserving films and whether people making the films can actually use either properly cinematographically. I've put up with the lack of access to less mainstream films in cinemas, and it's pointless to whine about blockbusters when I can avoid them. Probably the issue for me is that, in the middle of this current era, and used to believing trends within cinema are distinct, barring a few obvious ones there's few key movements that feel tangible or actually are worth talking about. Decades on, maybe an older Michael Hewis can have hindsight and wiser critics who can dig up the best of the 2000s and early 2010s rather than what's popular in the middle of it. Writing about Under The Skin, I am writing of a buzz, red hot British film that, while divisive, is getting the British film circles excited. Still under the brows of Jean-Luc Godard and Francois Truffaut's dismissal of British cinema, we have a complex on the subject of our country's filmic output, both dangerous in championing mediocrity by leaping on any work that wins an international award, and yet a hope like all of us like myself have for work that burns itself into cinema's history. The question is, can I really give a full, final review to Under The Skin after only one viewing or is this a blind leap for something different?

Scarlett Johansson is Laura, a mysterious beauty, clearly a being that is not human when she takes the clothes and identify of her doppelganger in a white room. With an unknown motorcyclist guiding and watching over her, cleaning up aftermaths, she drives around urban Scotland in a white van, a siren to men leading them to a death in literal blackness. The film caused me to sit up from the beginning, the first inclination of what virtues this film has not being the first visuals but the first notes of sound, a modernist score by Mica Levi that, atonal yet melodic, unsettling yet alluring, cements the mood before images appear. When the images do appear, what appears seems to be a doughnut shaped entity encircling over a ball, a globe, a planet, from the blackness, a light that turns into the headlight of a motorcycle. A human eye. Against the music, it becomes tangible and felt fully. But this is within a film that has decided to also depict a realism of the human world Laura travels around, to the point it technically qualifies as documentary at points.

The film becomes quasi-documentary as secret cameras were used to depict the real Scotland, a Hollywood actress playing a distant being, with a British accent, wandering the streets or driving on the roads, next to brand stores like Marks & Spencer. When a road is congested by football fans, in mass and blocking cars from moving, the likelihood you're viewing actual football fans pass through a film that is made to be fiction is felt, knowing this production detail immersing. Fiction next to bursts of actual reality are odd bedfellows but together you can get incredible results onscreen, reality piercing the fictional and effecting it. This goes as far as some of the men Laura talks to, in an attempt to lure men to her trap, are actual men randomly found on the street, who gave permission for the final footage of them to be used, having a conversation with  Johansson with the hesistant pauses and errs of real conversation. The mixing of this and the unreal sci-fi adds a unique layering to the film, real ordinary life with the fantastique, giving one hope that the British environment - of stores, chewing gum covered pavements, council housing - can intertwine with the supernatural and, forgive the pun, truly alien.

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Immense appreciation is there for Johansson for taking this role in the first place, and that her performance, with a cold tone of voice and minimal dialogue, is good enough and more so to make it work. The glamour of her Hollywood work follows her into this, adding to her aloneness, but as the character develops a distracted empathy for one of her potential victims and breaks away from the predestined tasks of hers, the sense of an ordinary woman, onscreen and as a person whose vocation is to act in these works called films, comes out. Honestly, this ordinariness actually makes her even more beautiful - unlike Black Widow in The Avengers (2012) who is a Barbie doll for male geeks, Laura, especially the scenes of seduction, feels more powerful for the mix of the real actress playing the character and the role itself she's playing. It also befits the character's duality, the cold mix of being a complete stranger, where the act of communication is an odd experience for the entity trying to make small talk, and a person, particularly when it comes to the last quarter when Laura ventures off into the countryside away from the motor biker. It would have been a difficult role - minimal or improvised dialogue, having to use a British accent that had to be convincing, the non-fiction conversations with people off the streets, the same sort of distance that David Bowie brought to his character in The Man Who Fell To Earth (1976) - and she does so fully. And it's a testament that, for a minimal amount, the other actors and non-actors stand out as much, especially Adam Pearson as the person that causes her to break away from the role she's in.

The welding of the fantastical and the real is different from many others that do the same, probably because unlike The Man Who Fell To Earth this is set in the truly ordinary. It's modernist score sends shivers down the spine, the distinct moments of the unhuman - bright white room, complete black liquid - stand out, but the world being depicted involves buses, Tommy Cooper, and baked beans. A moment where the protagonist tries to connect with the world is done with a black forest gateaux. In fact even the turning point where she gains struggling emotions involved the mention of the supermarket Tescos, the banality of Britain against the unreal creating probably a more abstract tone than for other films. The banal also becomes alien, the sound design becoming one with the score, the lights of passing vehicles UFOs on the roads, and the juxtaposition of these objects with fantastical blurring into one another. Few films are willing to depict a reality within fantasy itself, or fantasy within the real, but this one does. If you can put yourself into Laura's position within the final piece of the narrative, the film becomes as much the story of how an ordinary environment grows into unknown proportions when there is no connection to it, slowing grasping to understand. Of course this has potential feminist readings in how her body is being used as a tool to capture men and how she tries to escape from this. Ultimately the roles are switched of who is prey and victim, the same human beings where the sound of a balloon popping will never sound the same for me again without a creepiness to them. Neither side is inherently good or evil, just treating each other as mere others. Laura can blend into a gaggle of women, probably real people being filmed, taking her along hand-by-hand to a dance club, only for her to be unnerved by the strange world inside, bleeding red lighting, and music so loud, as someone who hates loud uncontrolled noise can attest to, that it's no longer music but a sonic barrage. The normal world is just as unknown as hers. The most disturbing set piece involves a beach incident that happens in everyday life, not the alien, a horrifying incident that is made more disturbing when one onlooker is so detached from the situation, showing how such a everyday accident in more troubling in happening to anyone.

The issue of whether the film will last in quality is there for this final viewing, but leaving the Showroom cinema in Sheffield, I could still feel the impact of the images and sound, and they've jarred themselves into my mind for weeks from that viewing. The discordant string sounds repeating again and again as I was walking in the afternoon air of the city, a rich tableaux that will sink in my thoughts and stay there for a while. It will at least have the virtue of being "total cinema", where every piece (acting, tone, editing, colour, sound etc.) is considered or in some way as distinct as the other pieces and all add to one fully immersive work. Very few films actually care for this, and a big problem with British cinema is that aspects that build the whole of a film are virtually ignored, but this film does so. What I feel with Under The Skin is an unnerved exhilaration. I have never seen any other work by Jonathan Glazer's, even his music videos; I can't explain why I haven't, but Under The Skin is encouragement at its strongest to go to them. The individuality of the film stands out even as a strong, potential entry for the cult British canon of cinema, causing one to wonder why we can't have more directors follow these braver ricks more. It's a peculiar entry into the archives of British Film Institution funded work being made now, as we speak, but only because I wish more people would do this rather than make the conventional.

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