Getting Under The Skin

Under the skin, beneath the beauty they say, is something else, some other notion of being that is a distinct noumena to the fleshy phenomena.

Under The Skin is Jonathan Glazer's third film. Having found great depth in his previous two films, Sexy Beast and Birth, my expectations for his latest work have been high and I've made the usual efforts to avoid too much preamble. I knew Scarlett Johansson was the lead and that she played an alien on Earth to observe and that was about it. Before heading into the cinema last night I had only seen a few snippets from written reviews and the trailer.

Preamble

The trailer itself was quite refreshing when viewed against many of it's modern contemporaries that seek to condense the entire plot of the film into two-and-a-half minutes. Compare the above trailer with this effort for the new Johnny Depp flick Transcendence...

Unless all that happens in the first act of the film, I'd feel somewhat cheated. Imagine seeing it blind and how much more emotional weight things like the unexpected death of a main character early on would have and how it would colour the film differently than if you already knew that beforehand. Maybe the film-makers don't want me to care about the character? They would prefer I should watch the battle bits and maybe have a pseudo intellectual conversation in the bar afterwards about the perils of technology. The sort where everyone involved sucks their teeth and shakes their heads.

But I digress.

Looking

While I was keen to see Under The Skin anyway the mentions of Kubrick and Science Fiction upped the ante for me. One of Glazer's great skills is in the crafting of shots and colour palettes. Both previous films had a distinct colour scheme for their locations and this helps build the mise-en-scene to provide a realistic backdrop for the characters and the plot.

The alien prepares for its work.

Within the first ten minutes it became clear that this was going to be the case again. As Sexy Beast had predominantly dealt bright oranges, yellows and blues, Birth more sepia tones and crème Under The Skin presents a uniformly grey backdrop for much of the action. What's interesting is how this grey is used. Grey often gets a bad wrap for being the dull colour, that middle ground that's intolerable in any real setting. Here though it represents a permeating, almost suffocating, feeling to the film. Whether it is the grey of the sky, the fog or the buildings of the film; it seems to burrow in a vague sense of subcutaneous menace.

One of the other functional uses of grey is it allows what colour there is to seem more striking. Just as so many films are permeated by the colour wheel theorising of teal and orange, because it pops, the same is true of sitting a bright colour over grey. 

There were scenes where bright colours were used against black and this helped to really stylise those sections and indicate that this was something else; something other than the real world of the film.

Alongside this palette there was a conscious decision to film many of the scenes in a (often literally) distant way. There are many scenes, particularly in the latter half of the film where small elements of action are set against a larger landscape. A motorbike distantly crossing an expansive landscape, an ant clambering over someone's finger or a deeply layered composite shot that highlights a face from all the traces and blips in the action. This continual distortion of scale serves two functions.

Composite shot reveals the alien's face.

Firstly, and most Kubrickly (if that is a word), it leaves you out of the action. Scenes unfold but you feel far away. During a scene where people are swimming out to sea to rescue a dog, the camera never even gets close to the water. The struggle is viewed from a distance and you feel distanced from it. Without the close up shot of panic, with water sloshing over the lens; without the subaquatic distortion of the sound with the quick changes between light and dark, it is hard to feel for those involved. Glazer is getting us to view events in the film in the way that the alien sees things. Dispassionately. Chronologically. 

Secondly the scaling of shots lends a more universal feel to the film. This alien is here on Earth, cells coalesced in one body in a van on a street in a city in a country on a continent on a planet in a solar system in a galaxy in a universe amongst universes. There is a balance between how discrete the action is in a scientific way with the discrete way the alien operates sociologically. 

The cinematography in general was superb and constructed like a house of cards, or the lyrics of Elliott Smith, it felt as if all the parts were interdependent in a way that to remove one part would do more than just reveal the constituent parts, it would reveal the horrible uselessness of those parts in constructing the whole. The cards are just cards otherwise, the lyrics are just useless words from a metaphorical language struggling to do a job, the lights in the film are just bulbs and the photographic filters just discs of dull stupid materials.

Thinking

Much of the plot has already been detailed (an alien on Earth to observe) further up and this really is the core of it. There are implications that the alien does this in a variety of ways, but we see mostly erotic based encounters where she lures men in. These often start with a series of questions as the alien gauges their situation and the likelihood of them being missed. 

While this may sound predatory often it seems more like a curiosity on the alien's part, to see the arousal of these base urges in the subjects. All of the scenes that feature the culmination of this process are presented in an abstract setting. If what you are seeing is literally true or metaphorical is hard to tell.

These moments of abstraction coupled with the clinical presentation of the film is an attempt by Glazer to ask us what we think of the scenes and people we see unfold and often our instinctual reactions are at odds with the alien's. Where we would help, it observes, where we might steer clear it engages. By having you at odds with the mostly silent protagonist you are given space to think along with the film. So that sometimes you can see a greater quality in the alien's behaviour that starts to connect you emotionally in a way that you almost want to resist. The alien is not here to better mankind, or to enslave us, only to observe us. And it is this that ultimately binds you to it.

The voyeurism of the shooting style is coupled with the voyeuristic nature of the alien. It may seem strange to say that through this shared voyeurism you emote but I think that is definitely the intent. It won't work for everyone, but when it does, it has great potential.  

The alien takes a moment to look at itself

I heard a number of derogatory remarks about it from fellow patrons as we left the screen. While in the bathroom immediately after I was treated to one man complaining at length about the film being boring. While there is a certain lack of explosive narrative impetus, even when the alien deliberately starts to deviate from it's mission, there was plenty of narrative development to keep you interested and what's more to keep you thinking afterwards.

This idea that a film should deliver its every message in it's runtime is patently absurd. Part of the engagement you have with any crafted work of art is in taking time to appreciate it away from the experience of it. To think about the painting after you have left the gallery means the next time you see the painting, or any painting, you are coming to it differently. You have another frame of reference, you can make comparison between memory and actuality that allows further nuances to arise. That's the very nature of the relation between being human and observation.

So to say that guy missed the point on almost every level is probably not even close.

Conclusion?

While the film has a definite end point and the narrative draws to a close it is one of those films where it is so striking that the film continues to breathe and brood inside your head. Lines of thought grow out of the scenes and touch back on the film and allow you to constantly reassess what motivations where at play both by the characters and the creators.

In this sense two other things need expounding upon.

1. The soundtrack is phenomenal. What Mica Levi has done is create one of the great soundtrcks of the past few years mxing a variety of elements to great effect. Heightening some scenes with discordant electronica or microtonal strings and then embiggening others by it's sudden absence the soundtrack is as important as any of the other elements. Here's an example track that demonstrates the ambient elements during the first half before the microtonal strings kick in half way through to create one of the haunting themes from the film...

2.Scarlett Johansson has produced a performance that is beyond anything she has managed previously. Yes, even better than her Mindy in The SpongeBob SquarePants Movie. Her ability to sell the shifting outer projections of the alien's character whilst still maintaining a colder depth to the scenes is everything that Glazer could possibly have wanted as the central live component in the visual work he was creating. I fear that this film is a bit too SF and has come out too early in the year for this performance to be remembered come awards season but it truly marks a step up in her career and shows a masterful control and development of her talent.

The film seems to be reaching the end of its theatrical run now ready for home release in the near future, though no date seems to have been set. I'm already looking forward to seeing it again and getting a second, different, experience from it and discussing it with my fellow film friends.