ScarJo bares more than her skin
Scarlett Johansson dares a lot in Under the Skin, even more than the amount of flesh she actually bares.
Taking on the role of a sexy-dressing, blank-eyed seductress who drives around Edinburgh in a van, picking up the odd hitchhiker, Johansson goes where she’s never gone before in the arthouse sci-fi film, Under the Skin. “Bold” doesn’t even cover it.
Under the Skin is also unusual in that dialogue is kept to a bare minimum. You won’t be the first viewer to wonder, after 10 minutes of bold but enigmatic images — pieces of smooth metal inserting, converging, a human iris opening, babbled nonsensical words recited on the soundtrack — “What the hell is going on here?”
Indeed, those looking for cheap thrills from the promise of nudity on Ms. Johansson’s part might be more baffled than titillated.
Director Jonathan Glazer’s third film (after Sexy Beast and the Nicole Kidman enigma, Birth) takes off from the novel by Michel Faber, a Dutch writer who has lots to say about the planet, and sexual roles, and what it means to be human. His character in the novel is cool and distanced, and increasingly angry in her job duties — which involve driving around and picking up male passengers, though for what is only gradually revealed.
What changes in her character, and what lingers in the mind after reading Under the Skin, is how she encounters a foreign environment — in this case, the foggy Scottish Highlands — and comes to find great beauty in it, along with mounting horrors.
Daringly, though some would say needlessly, director Glazer jettisons most of the storyline, dialogue and plot of Under the Skin. He reportedly relied on a more cinéma vérité style, setting up hidden cameras and allowing Johansson to pick up actual strangers on the road, not actors, to engage them in conversation (though one supposes few male hitchhikers would fail to recognize the international sex icon behind the wheel.) The tactic does result in more spontaneous dialogue with the passengers — even more off-putting is the fact that we can barely understand their Scottish accents.
What initially feels like disappointment that Faber’s book has been tossed aside gives way to eerie, almost hypnotic fascination: What is she doing to these males? Why are they disappearing into the bottomless floor, swallowed up by an inky blackness as she advances slowly, sans clothes, as though walking on water? And what about those floating remnants of skin, like garments tossing and turning in the air like a slow-motion clothes dryer?
The answers do emerge, almost like smoky words swimming up in a Magic 8-Ball, but by that time, you will have either decided to go along with Glazer’s vision, or tuned out.
Those who don’t tune out will see some remarkable images, things comparable, as some reviewers have said, to Kubrick’s images in 2001: A Space Odyssey. Smooth, futuristic surfaces and mind-altering closeups remind us of the realm of HAL and the “Jupiter Mission” tunnel sequence of 2001. There’s a lot here too that reminds us of Terence Malick’s approach: enigmatic objects, scrutinized for eternity, with little narrative to clear things up. Another cinematic reference point is Nicholas Roeg, who specialized in defamiliarizing the familiar in films like Walkabout, Performance and especially The Man Who Fell to Earth. Johansson’s plight, and her reaction to it all, does recall David Bowie’s turn as Newton, an alien who’s scouting Earth for its abundant water supply. Newton’s perplexity, and gradual deterioration, in the face of vertigo, alcohol and television (“It shows you everything and tells you nothing”) is similar to the way our planet eats away at Johansson’s core in Under the Skin.
What Glazer wants, perhaps, is for us to experience Earth the way his female protagonist does. For her part, Johansson does a pretty remarkable job, registering consternation and fascination in various turns. Her clothes peel off numerous times in this movie, but it’s not gratuitous, exactly: her body is a real woman’s body, which may shock people used to seeing her dolled up in teased hair, bustiers and butt-hugging outfits. (She does wear butt-hugging outfits in Under the Skin: it’s just that the effect is more disconcerting than merely sexy.)
To be fair to Faber’s book, it was more plot-driven than necessary. (Maybe that’s why it was a bestseller back in 2000.) Glazer is going after “art” here, and he just may have succeeded, because even if you do emerge from Under the Skin scratching your head and going “Huh?”, there are things you will find difficult to erase from your cinematic memory. In other words, the film leaves a lasting impression, even if you’re hard-pressed to put the precise effect into words.
