UNDER THE SKIN A-
Great Britain (108
mi) 2013
d: Jonathan Glazer Official
Site
Scarlett Johansson has finally learned to play roles that
take advantage of how she’s perceived by a largely testosterone-laden male
public, as a sex object where beauty is only skin deep, and they are infatuated
by what they see. In Joseph
Gordon-Levitt’s Don Jon
(2013), she plays the voluptuous tease, believing she’s the ultimate in beauty
and sex, as she’s molded herself to match the perfect fantasy image of what
guys want, while in Spike Jonze’s Her (2013),
she lacks human and physical form and exists only as a voice of virtual reality
perfection. Jonathan Glazer’s film takes
the same title from Carine Adler’s first and only feature film, the one that
features a sizzling breakout performance from Samantha Morton, a largely unheralded
yet small gem of a film. Glazer resorts
to the sci-fi genre to freely adapt the Dutch-born Michel Faber novel about an
extraterrestrial who comes to earth, much like Nicolas Roeg’s The
Man Who Fell to Earth (1976), though what plot there is plays out more
along the lines of Claire Denis’s Trouble
Every Day (2001), but with a different twist, where unlike the book, the
film is far more ambiguous and less explanative, leaving the audience in the
dark without many clues to figure out just what’s going on. The opening credit sequence, in something of
an homage to Kubrick, reveals intergalactic origins, including the abstract atonal
symphonic composition by Mica Levi, aka Micachu, which is
equally otherworldly, where in something of a wordless visual splendor, a speck
of light in an enveloping darkness approaches the viewer, eventually becoming a
blinding shot of light, where the connection to humanity is complete when after
a few planetary transfigurations the light becomes a reflection of a human eye. Without a hint of backdrop, the
extraterrestrials have arrived in the form of Scarlett Johansson in a black wig,
who along with a motorcycle helper, retrieves a dead body, and in a remarkable
white screen with no recognizable floor, we see her pull the clothes off the
dead woman and place them on her own simulated body, where the transformation
is complete, as she passes unrecognizably through the crowded streets of
Scotland.
Returning to filmmaking for the first time since BIRTH
(2004), Glazer, in a screenplay co-authored with Walter Campbell, turns Faber’s
extraterrestrial perspective into a feminist view of female objectification,
where women are judged and valued through surface artificiality, and what’s
inside hardly matters. That’s the
central premise of the film as an unnamed Scarlett Johansson trolls for
unattached men whose absence won’t be missed by anyone, cruising the streets of
Glasgow, initially asking innocent questions, asking for directions, eventually
luring men into a white van. Of
interest, the director had hidden cameras installed in the van and only
informed various male bystanders caught off guard afterwards that they were in
a movie. While she speaks a vague
British accent, most of the men have thick Scottish accents that make what they
have to say incomprehensible. Wearing
ankle boots, tight jeans, and a fur jacket, with a thick layer of red lipstick,
Johansson has a Sirenesque sexual quality from her insinuations, asking if
they’re alone, if they have a girlfriend, if they like what they see, etc. In this way she lures men to a secret
apartment that has a hypnotic effect upon them, set to an unsettling score, where
they both undress as they enter and she lures them (and their erections) ahead
into a black pit of doom, “Dreaming, dreaming,” one man murmurs, to which she
answers, “Yes, yes we are.” While she’s
able to walk over it, they obviously have no idea even as they are quickly
submerged in a sea of thick, oily black water, left to some strange Hellish
fate where they’re done for. In the book
they’re fattened up and eventually harvested for food back on their planet,
which is in need of food, but here, without a word of exposition, the
intentions are more darkly obscure.
While the film taps into cultural superficialities, what is
clear is that Scarlett Johansson is undeniably beautiful, again representing
herself as an ideal feminine object, seen in what resembles naked human form
early on, where obtaining her sexually, from a male point of view, is
ostensibly the epitome of cultural acquisition, where regardless of what might
be under her skin, and here she is entirely alien, she is considered the
ultimate prize or male achievement within the context of the film and modern
day culture. Despite any intuitive
analysis, however, only a bare minimum is revealed, where the film is an
eye-opening slap to the face with an impeccable look, nearly wordless and
driven by such meticulous composition and visual stylization from cinematographer
Daniel Landin. What’s interesting is
that the viewer is lured into this unexpectedly haunting and inexplicable world
in much the same way as the men are lured to Scarlett, where for most of the
picture we haven’t a clue where this is going, where we are as much in the dark
as Scarlett appears to be, a stranger in a strange land, as she has a robotic
assignment, but she begins to recognize something more beyond her mission. The first sign of this is a peculiar change
in the routine, where after a prolonged reflection of herself in a mirror, we
realize she has released one of her victims, seen running away off in the
distance, still naked. Rather than
preying on unsusceptible men, she herself becomes the prey, suddenly the target
of her own accompanying motorcycle team who begin searching for her, as if
she’s somehow malfunctioned. After
spending some time sheltered by a stranger who asks no questions and treats her
with kindness and respect, but introduces her to earthly sex, she is somewhat
stupefied and retreats deeper into the woods.
In a film about the artifice of surface realities, the natural beauty of
the woods takes on darker hidden impulses, where the world is not as it seems,
yet she is immersed, like her previous victims, in this primeval darkness that
all but envelops her, exposing her for what she is. One cannot ascribe human emotions and
feelings to this non-human entity, who has her own peculiar eccentricities and
curiosities about her, but it’s an interesting transformation from being all
powerful to becoming powerless, subject to the baser elements of man. It’s a mystifyingly beautiful and strangely
puzzling little film that does wonders with an absolute minimum, much like the
non-narrative, abstract idealizations in Terrence Malick’s To the
Wonder (2012), where Glazer offers a similar philosophical quest for
meaning.
