Under the Skin begins in some kind
of deeper blackness, less cinema space than outer space. Perhaps it’s the same unfriendly
blackness to which our protagonist will deposit her victims. A projector’s beam
cuts through, and we’re looking at what appears to be the formation of an eye,
listening to what sounds like the uploading of verbal nuance in infinite
variety, some ultra-fast-tracked language lessons. Sound and vision—it’s alive!
Alive! Or nearly so.
The “it” in question is a
femme fatale of the third kind, and it’s taken control of the luscious exterior
of some sacrificial lass who looks just like Scarlett Johansson. It, now she,
is a long cool black widow who’s come to Scotland from another galaxy to go
cruising in a big black van for hapless lusty louts, luring them to some
anonymous flat where they’ll sink into some fatal ink, their bodies bloating
and bursting and their flesh harvested for unspecified purposes. She hasn’t
been bred or programmed for pity or compassion, but as this mysterious, singularly
arresting work of science fiction-meets-quasi-anthropological experiment makes
its way, she will develop something called curiosity, one of the finer but also
more precarious human attributes. It can lead to discovery and empathy, but also
vulnerability and danger.
The sound of a baby’s cry on
some rocky beach seems to be the tipping point in our story. From here on our
anti-heroine goes native begins to wonder about the world, its culture, and, in
one of the film’s most humorous moments, her own body. As Mica Levi’s music—one
of the best scores I’ve heard in years, its strings like agitated bees—shape
the film’s sound-world into an increasingly sensitive, tenser, almost febrile
place, we come to see earthly life through extraterrestrial eyes: the utter
weirdness of a space heater or a television or a discotheque or kissing, or
this whole eating and drinking business. I can think of few films so alienating
and yet so exquisitely alert to hypothetical first impressions of what for the
rest of us is just drearily ordinary life.
Jonathan Glazer has spent his filmmaking career loving the alien. Both
of his previous features, Sexy Beast (2000)
and Birth (2004), turn on the arrival
of a strange and threatening visitor. In the case of Under the Skin, inspired by the less cryptic Michel Faber novel of
the same name, Glazer’s visitor moves
from the role of antagonist to that of protagonist in what is nearly a
first-person narrative. It’s a bold, creepy notion and, it would seem, an
irresistible challenge. I met with Glazer during Under the Skin’s Canadian premiere at the 2013 Toronto International
Film Festival and asked him about his interest in assuming the quintessential
Other’s point of view.
“Making choices about what it
is that she sees never stopped being exciting to me, even as years of starts
and stops passed,” Glazer explains. “What does she get to experience of this
world and what will it mean to her as it accumulates? Our idea in shaping the
story was always that if you could understand what she saw and, latterly, how
she felt, then you would find your place in this unusual story. To find that
osmotic growth for her was always the bottom line.”
The project was indeed a
labour of long-term love, nearly nine years in the making, yet Glazer’s
perfectionism regarding filmmaking craft—those comparisons to Stanley Kubrick
are not merely decorative—and the development of the script, co-written by
Glazer and Walter Campbell, is shrewdly thwarted by a modus operandi designed
to dismantle directorial control. The scenes which find our anti-heroine
looking for men were produced by having a wigged Johansson—who’s perfect in
this role, by the way—actually drive around in a van outfitted with hidden
cameras and actually try to pick up random dudes off the street. The surprise
and arousal of these men are real. Repurposing techniques employed by Abbas
Kiarostami in Ten (2002), directorial
control during these sequences was limited to what Glazer could see remotely
and what he could say to Johansson via a tiny earpiece. It may sound like a
gimmick, but this approach gives the film a texture that it would have
otherwise lacked.
“The writing was very
rigorous,” Glazer explained. “We spent a lot of time turning over ideas until
they felt absolutely essential. We needed sturdy planning to allow the
improvisation to flourish. Without a plan, when you go off-course you can just
get lost. I wanted the film to have a clear structure but also to just find
itself sometimes—and it did. Scarlett turns left and the film’s going to down
that street, she turns right and it’s going down that one. It was an extremely
liberating way to work, driving around in that van with all the cameras
shooting simultaneously, knowing that the scene hinged on her going over to
someone and making a choice in the instant. Exhilarating. I loved it. I would
still be in that van, given the choice.”
The influence of
Kubrick on Glazer is obvious, but Under
the Skin contains more distinctive and intriguing echoes of the films of
Nicolas Roeg, not only because Roeg’s The
Man Who Fell to Earth (1976) works from a similar premise, but because the
radical approach to editing and perspective in Roeg’s best films invite a
balance of precision and spontaneity into storytelling that Glazer seems to be
aspiring to. Of course, after spending so many years conceiving of and giving
birth to Under the Skin, Glazer’s
eyes glaze over when the subject of precedents or influences arise. So much
goes into making a movie, the countless choices and compromises, it’s hardly
like Glazer spent the whole time thinking, “What would Nic do?”
“Film is a language,” Glazer says with a calm
objectivity that kind of mirrors that of his film’s protagonist. “You start
with the letters, working through the alphabet, and then one by one you write a
sentence, then a paragraph, and then you get to the point where you’re fluent
enough to write poetry.”
Glazer’s particular poetry
is layered in a way that’s native to cinema, austere on the surface but dense
with sensations arrived at by the collision of artifice and reality, direction
and observation, fruitful collaboration and auteurist
vision, exposition and mystery. There is a long, dreamlike dissolve near
the film’s unforgettable ending that matches nothing else in the rest of the
film, yet it is haunting, and it feels absolutely critical to the protagonist’s
journey. It is perhaps the strongest evidence in favour of Glazer’s unique creative
gifts—other directors would not have found it. Under the Skin will surely frustrate some. It does have a way of
getting under your skin. And it is a work of eerie and cruel beauty.
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