The Skin I Live In – Pedro Almodóvar

Almodovar’s latest film casts Antonio Banderas as a high profile cosmetic surgeon and scientist named Robert Ledgard.Without saying too much, Robert has managed to successfully mutate human skin with pig skin in a bid to enhance the human epidermis – creating a super strong sheath, resistant to insect bites and therefore diseases such as malaria.Robert appears to have imprisoned a young woman (Vera) in his suave Spanish mansion. It seems she is his human guinea pig – the recipient of his new skin concoction. The tale that unravels concerns who this woman is exactly, and the nature of the couple’s darkly erotic relationship.

At it’s heart this film is in fact a science fiction fantasy, not what i was expecting. The storyline is rooted in absurdity. It’s unrealistic, but not in a negative sense. The surrealism is subtle, masterfully handled. For three quarters of the film I was totally acceptant of the strange alternative reality it offers. It all seemed feasible.

Some elements are classic Almodovar. The story is a dramatic web that slowly untangles, but the tone is stone cold, offering a change to his usual hearty, blood pumping passion. If this film had a pulse it would be pretty faint.

Surprisingly unaffecting despite dealing with some potentially disturbing themes, (kidnapping, sexual violence, body horror) the film lacks tension. Seemingly scared to bite too hard, it does not have sufficient shock value to justify the iciness of tone. ‘Shock value’ sounds like a cheap term, but it’s worth mentioning as the film promises it, but doesn’t deliver – a dissappointing factor.

I feel Almodovar took a controversial, psychological horror story and quashed it slightly by adding an air of  whimsy. He also does not give enough insight into the characters for us to care about them, they seem souless.

Where the film succeeds is in its visual beauty and style. A wonderful experience for both the eyes and ears. Elena Anaya’s naked body and skin plays perhaps the most important role in the film, in the role of Vera she is a captive object of sexual desire, her body is subject to a wealth of mistreatment throughout, though we rarely winess on-screen gore.

It must also be noted that the story arc is tackled in a creative and original way It effortlessly flows back and forward in time, revealing itself organically. Almodovar deserves to be commended on tackling psychology rarely touched in film. However, despite looking fantastic and being finely executed, without an added kick, what could’ve been a hugely poingnant tale left me feeling pretty hollow.

Alternative film options in a similar vein:

For fans of surreal obsession / kidnap films try Kim-Ki Duk’s Bad Guy
For fans of disturbed doctors  / mutations / gynaecology try David Cronenbourg’s Dead Ringers

Black Swan – Darren Aronofsky

Vincent Cassel plays Thomas, a dominating, alpha-male ballet director putting together a production of Swan Lake. He realises the show has been done to death but he wants to inject new blood into it. When Nina (Nathalie Portman) is chosen for the lead role Thomas has no doubt that her abilities are perfectly suited to the part of the White Swan. However for her to successfully portray the evil side of the character, the Black Swan, she must dig deep to unlock darker parts of herself.

The way in which this film is so clever is that the storyline mimics and entwines itself with that of Swan Lake. Like the white swan, Nina is shy, scared and sexually naïve. She is controlled by her weird, bitter mother, who she lives with. Eventually her personality starts to crack under the stress of her role. She strives for perfection and her mental state becomes unstable under the weight of her obsession.

As the sense of dread rises dramatically we are always unsure of what is real. Aronofsky introduces fear early on and throughout the film we are guessing at whether Nina has gone completely insane, or if she is caught in some kind of nightmare. The director is masterful in this process and as terror starts to escalate there are some genuinely disturbing sequences.

Black Swan contains scenes of Cronenberg style body horror. Nina is facially very beautiful, but her body is all anorexic-sinew and bone. Her nails are brittle and bleeding from her destructive ballet regimes and her diet of nothing. Mysterious cuts and scratches keep appearing on Nina’s body, unaware herself as to where they came from. She seems to self-harm without realising, scratching her shoulders and fingernails, but at the same time hallucinating about pulling off her skin. It is hard to watch as she cracks her toenail whilst performing a pirouette. The toll of ballet on the Nina’s body as well as her mind is fully explored.

Thomas is impatient with Nina and forcefully encourages her to explore her sexuality. He brands her frigid and sexless, asking ‘who here would want to fuck this girl?’ during rehearsals. He manipulates her into letting him fondle and kiss her in order to try and conjure some passion for her to use in her role as the black swan. However when she responds to his advances he belittles her by complaining that it should be her seducing him, not the other way round.

Thomas tells Nina to ‘go home and touch yourself’, but she is never given any privacy to do so by her over bearing mother. The sexual frustration goes through the roof, becoming a further catalyst for Nina’s nervous breakdown. It’s only when Nina makes contact with Mila Kunis’ character, the free spirited and sexually active Lily, that she gets the chance to act on her lesbian desires.

Nina is a psychological tangled mess who only becomes undone in the very last scenes of the film. Obsession and fear have gotten the best of her. Her personality slips between those of the contrasting black and white swans. I haven’t experienced such a well executed mixture of thrilling mental turmoil and horror since Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby.

Aronofsky uses some potentially risky CGI towards the peak of the film to highlight Nina’s transformation into the black swan, it’s arguably unnecessary but I think it works. Portman is completely brilliant. I believed every second of her performance and felt every emotion, none more than when Nina finds out she has got the lead role in Swan Lake. In this scene we see overwhelming waves of joy in Portmans face, plus spikes of fear, tension and confusion. It’s a truly remarkable performance and she should hands-down bag an Oscar for it.

Get Low – Aaron Schneider

Felix knows he is about to die. He has been living as a hermit in a wooden shack for 40 years. Now he wants to tell his story, confess his sins to the world. So he decides to throw a funeral party while he’s still alive.

Robert Duvall plays Felix, the badass old hermit. He’s sort of a 1930’s version of Clint Eastwood’s character in Gran Torino. Everyone in town has a different tale about Felix, he’s a Tennessee legend.

These tales about him seem primarily bad. People think he’s a killer, a dangerous man who should stay out of town, away from women and kids. Remember the scary old guy from Home Alone? He is kinda like that.

Bill Murray plays Frank Quinn, a funeral director going out of business. At first driven by money, his character develops nicely into someone who cares, minus the usual lumps of cheese that normally start to whiff in these kinds of films.

Murray is really great in this. I think the best thing about Bill Murray in recent years is that he could so easily go further with his shtick. He could just go into 5^th gear now and pump everything he stars in full of Murray-ness, but he doesn’t, he holds back just enough. Unless they cut his scenes down it seems Murray played this role tastefully. He keeps Duvall as the focus of our attention, even though we know he is capable of stealing a film from most actors.

I’ve never seen Garfield.

So the storyline of this film is pretty straightforward, and as has been said in some reviews I’ve read, it’s more about the acting.

Robert Duvall is an excellent actor. If you haven’t seen 2009’s Crazy Heart with him and Jeff Bridges then I highly recommend it, if only for Duvall’s supporting role. He is so natural in everything I’ve seen him in. One of my favourites is his role as Prendergast in 1993’s Falling Down. Having re-watched it recently I realised Duvall is bald, he wears a very convincing hair piece in Get Low, something that for some reason always interests me about films. Whenever I watch a Nicholas Cage film for example I’m always thinking, ‘does that wig look real?’ Little things like this sometimes bug me, but I can confirm the wigs in this film are of high realism.

Duvall makes getting old look cool in this film. He is a highly likeable and hugely believable actor who will no doubt receive some well deserved praise for Get Low. Hopefully he has many years of acting left in him, but I’m guessing he won’t be over-working himself in his old age, hence choosing a role of this type which really showcases his skill.

I would describe this as a good film, with a well written script and great performances. I wouldn’t shower it with much more praise than that. I felt the build up towards Felix’s unveiling of his deepest darkest secret was slightly non-eventful. Although in relation to his character you can see how his life must’ve been turned upside down by what I will only describe as a horrific event.

When you feel like watching a film that’s quite touching, with dark undertones, droplets of humour, Eastwood-esque punk-old-man vibes, and Bill Murray then stick this on.

My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done – Werner Herzog

In 2009 Werner Herzog displayed a return to directorial form with the truly excellent Bad Lieutenant. In the same year he co-wrote and directed My Son, My Son What Have Ye Done, produced by David Lynch. The film has found its way onto the movie rental shelves relatively unnoticed, I recently managed to grab a copy.

On paper a Lynch / Herzog collaboration seems like a match made in heaven, or rather hell. However, what I felt had the makings of a cult movie, didn’t make full use of a fantastic cast and suitably dark plot.

Michael Shannon plays the lead role of Brad. Since returning from a canoeing trip in Peru on which many of his friends drowned, Brad has been spiralling into the depths of depression, his behaviour becoming increasingly erratic.

Brad lives with his mother, played by Grace Zabriskie, who any self respecting Lynch fan will recognise from her iconic role as Sarah Palmer in Twin Peaks. She also memorably appeared as a creepy neighbour in Lynch’s 2006 movie Inland Empire. Zabriskie doesn’t have to do much to act weird, she oozes it. Her face alone leaves me shuddering.

Shannon and Zabriskie’s matching boggly, intense eye-balls make them believable as a messed up mother and son. They live in the suburbs, i’d like to say ‘Lynchian suburbs’ but unfortunately it’s not quite Blue Velvet. The setting does have its own charm however, Brad owns two Flamingos who he calls his ‘Eagles in drag’. I was aware that US suburbanites sometimes have fake Flamingos on their lawns, I didn’t realise they could be pets.

Brad says god lives in his kitchen, and it turns out he believes god is the Quaker guy on the front of an oatmeal box (that’s porridge to UK readers). It’s surreal moments like this that make the film worth watching.

At the start of the movie Brad stabs his mother with a samurai sword and Hank (Willem Dafoe) is the detective called to the scene of the crime. Dafoe is a strong choice to play this befuddled law enforcer, yet he never really gets to do much aside from have a confused look on his face. For the bulk of the film Brad is inside his house with a shotgun and two hostages. He shouts hilarious demands to the police and throws oatmeal cartons out of the house claiming ‘I no longer need god’

Brad’s back-story is told in a series of flashbacks. On the ill fated canoeing trip we see he is concerned that the river is too dangerous to canoe. He barks at his hippy friends: ‘stop meditating and open your eyes, this is the river, this is reality!’

This statement seems key to the film’s main focus, that of exploring the parallels between religion and madness. There is also an element of ancient Greek style tragedy to the plot, found in Brad’s relationship with his mother and his eventual slaying of her. Brad is too old to live at home, but he claims to stay there because his mother needs him, in killing her he sets himself free, but by this point he seems too deranged to actually attach motive to any of his actions. Through Brad, Herzog shows us madness in it’s destructive glory.

There is an awesome supporting cast including Udo Kier, Chloe Sevigney, and Brad Dourif but as with Dafoe, Herzog does not give any of them much to work with. I feel he really had a good thing going here but he didn’t develop the characters, he only skimmed the surface. Story-wise, further plot development would’ve undoubtedly helped, I definitely felt there was more to explore, more that could’ve been written for this great cast.

In some respects it’s good to leave an audience wanting more, but that’s not the case here. Instead I felt ever so slightly let down. The only person who truly shines in the film is Michael Shannon who I hope to see more of based on his compelling, psychotic performance.

Somewhere – Sophia Coppola

‘Somewhere’ starts with a static shot of a car racing around a track in the desert and at first I thought maybe I’d been subject to an indie Rickrolling (I downloaded this film), because it just kept going round in a loop, but eventually the car stopped and out stepped Stephen Dorff’s character, Johnny Marco. I was relieved. This opening sequence sets the pace for the entire film. It places us in Johnny’s void, testing patience and creating tension.

Firstly, we are never given a full backstory and the characters in the film are never fleshed out, but this isn’t a criticism. Johnny Marco is a major Hollywood film star. In an early scene he drifts to sleep in his hotel room whilst two women pole dance ‘exotically’ to My Hero by the Foo Fighters. The song is played is played in it’s entirety and I reached a point where, despite the strippers, I began to feel as bored as Johnny, which was no doubt Coppola’s intention. There is of course humour in this sequence, some may say subtle, but to me it’s pretty blatantly indulgent to hire dancers to fall asleep to. Yet he has them over again the very next evening.

Hmm, strange behaviour. Johnny has seemingly been rich for quite a while, parties, booze and babes are nothing to him now. It’s 100% pure Brett Easton Ellis territory. Johnny is the LA vampire, cruising in his black Ferrari, his whole work schedule being orchestrated by his agents. It’s all emotionless voices from the end of phone and anonymous abusive texts we assume are from women he’s slept with – and he certainly does get through the ladies. They just pour themselves over him, sirens lurk in the hotel corridors, he walks up to whoever he wants and they are his.

Johnny sounds like he should be a complete swine, but he doesn’t come across like that. He’s deluded, his emotions vacuumed by his hedonistic lifestyle.

Here’s the hook, he has an 11 year old daughter, Cleo, played by Elle Fanning, who gets dumped on him by her mother who simply says she is ‘going away for a while’.

I very much enjoyed the subtle sweetness of scenes such as one where Cleo prepares Johnny breakfast – cooking for the man who lives off room service and restaurant food. In contrast to the rest of the film, this scene reminds us that preparing a meal by hand is a thing of value and substance. It’s a simple sentiment, but is key to the whole vibe, that Johnny has forgotten himself, he doesn’t know who he is anymore.

So the film becomes essentially a realistic father/daughter story. Through the well worn contrast of old and jaded vs young and vibrant we see how Cleo unintentionally helps Johnny get a little meaning back into his life. Though the film is never obvious about it and nothing is fully resolved, the fact that Johnny eventually cooks himself some spaghetti and half heartedly clears up his hotel room seems to me to hint that some level of self realisation has occurred.

To conclude, I took pleasure in being a voyeur of the world of Hollywood super stardom, it fascinated me. The light scripting encourages self interpretation which I found rewarding. ‘Somewhere’ could’ve been a damp narcissistic sponge, but instead it’s revealing and insightful, with just the right amount of black humour.

In terms of flaws, I felt Johnny and Cleo’s farewell was a touch too similar to that of Bill Murray’s and Scarlett Johansson’s in ‘Lost in Translation’ (Coppola’s breakthrough film), and also the clichéd statement Johnny makes: ‘I’m sorry I wasn’t there’ which to me felt a bit flabby, (I would’ve preferred either something more cutting and emotional or something subtle in keeping with the rest of the film). But all in all ‘Somewhere’ is another fantastic piece of film making from Sophia Coppola and comes highly recommended for fans of her work.