Roman (Thomas Schubert) is allowed out of a juvenile institution on ‘day release’; his job is at a morgue. So far so melodrama, especially as Roman is almost as emotionless as a corpse. We follow his faltering steps into the ‘real world’ as he tries to find a compass in a society that treats him with contempt; we don’t learn of his crime until well into the film.
The narrative progresses slowly, routinely; typically arthouse as it demands our patience as we wonder whether it’s better to actually live a life rather than watch someone else live theirs. However, it repays patience with intense drama, when Roman is sent to pick up a corpse in the street whilst a distraught wife is still clinging onto hope that her husband’s still alive, an an emotional payoff at the end when… well, I shan’t spoil it.
Death remains a taboo in western society; consumerism is driven in part by a desire to deny it: cosmetics for everyone. Breathing confronts death, particularly in the scene where the morgue attendants have to prepare a corpse of an old woman who has died at home. We get to see what we don’t wish to see as the deceased body is carefully attended to by men who, hitherto, have been generally unlikeable. It’s a particularly powerful scene.
It’s written and directed by Karl Markovics, who played the lead in the terrific The Counterfeiters (Aus-Ger, 2007) and I’m looking forward to his next film.
Jonathan Rosenbaum makes the point that while this film is about the forties, it’s set on the day of the Nazi surrender, it’s overlayed by a fifties’ sensibility. This is evident through the James Dean-like Zbigniew Cybulski (though Rosenbaum cites Brando) but also in the European Art cinema style in which its shot. The ‘heavy’ symbolism of the still above is a good example. Add to that the melodrama of the young man, who’s fighting against the Communists and wrestling with his conscience whilst falling in love with the beautiful, and melancholic, barmaid, you have cinema made for me.
This blu-ray edition looks terrific and so emphasises the wonderful cinematography with stunning Expressionist lighting. Director Andrezj Wadja was clearly influenced by Bergman, I love the horse that simply walks into the mise en scene, but also Welles, particularly his use of deep focus.
The film brilliantly dissects a moment in history when everything for Poland was going to change (except in a way it didn’t as they, once again, became dominated by a foreign power). The possiblities of the time, those grabbing power, the splintering of families due to the war, are all portrayed in an affecting human story. Cybulski plays Maciek who’s been sent to assassinate a Communist Party official; he fails but has the night to fulfill his task except that’s when he meets the barmaid.
The official’s son is part of the reactionary forces that are opposing the Russian takeover, however the bourgeoisie’s grab for power is in full swing anyway, shown by the small town major’s celebration at being appointed a minister. The climax of the party, where they are all drunkenly dancing to a bastardised version of a Polish national song, is truly surreal. As is the denouement for Maciek, in a setting worthy of Bunuel.
I’m not sure if Wadja’s in or out of fashion at the moment, very few of his recent films have been distributed in UK; he’s still making them and is 86 next Tuesday. Ashes and Diamonds forms the third in his ‘War Trilogy’, A Generation (Pokolenie, 1955) and Kanal (1957); there are all must-see films. The first two, the narratives are unconnected, have a pronounced debt to neo-realism; Ashes and Diamonds is a triumph of expressionist cinema.
Peter Mullan + council estate = it’s bloody grim. This is in the tradition of realist British cinema but I wonder if there’s a tendency to try and make the slice of working class life even grimmer than the last one we’ve seen. To be fair the writer-director Paddy Considine balances the portrayal of class by ensuring that Hannah (Olivia Colman) is abused on a posh estate, but I can’t help feeling I’ve seen enough of grim representations of ordinary people’s lives.
It is part of the excellence of the film, performance and script, that Mullan’s Joseph can be introduced kicking his dog to death and become likeable. These characters, even Eddie Marsan’s ‘respectable-but-scumbag’ James, are all human; there is no caricature. Best of all is Colman, who’s churchy-charity shop character is devastatingly portrayed. Without spoiling: I thought the climax contrived and unnecessary to the drama.
I look forward to a realist film about working class life that isn’t grim.Made in Dagenham showed how class solidarity can take on the ruling classes. That was set, however, in the 1960s and it could be that Thatcher’s legacy was to destroy working class cohesion. If so, then battered and disturbed characters may be all we have left.
Lars von Trier’s need to provoke ended badly for him at Cannes this year when he professed sympathy for Hitler. He isn’t a Nazi, as he said, and it’s best to let his films do his talking. The fracas was a distraction from Melancholia and Kirsten Dunst, winner of the best actress award.
Melancholia is far more straightforward than his last film, Antichrist, but shares an opening that’s awash with beautiful super-slow motion images. This, in effect a prelude, tells us the narrative to come and emphasises the film’s about the depressive Justine’s (Dunst) state of mind. This expressionist sequence, revisited to an extent at the end, is in stark contrast the part one (‘Justine’) which focuses on her wedding party. Von Trier’s pricking of bourgeois rituals, and hypocrisy, takes us back to Festen (Denmark, 1998), directed by Tomas Vinterberg, the first of the Dogme95 films. Dogme95 was anti-Hollywood, swearing a ‘vow of chastity’ in only using, for example, natural lighting, handheld camera and definitely no special effects. Von Trier was co-author, along with Vinterberg, of the manifesto but has long since departed from its tenets. However, this section utilises Dogme95′s trademark febrile camera and jump cuts.
Part two, ‘Claire’, focuses on Justine’s sister’s attempts to help the latter out of her depression. Science fiction enters the narrative as the planet Melancholia is approaching Earth, though we are promised it will merely ‘fly by’ and everyone will be saved. The symbolism is clear for all and generates a quite brilliant climax.
However, and maybe this is a result of seeing the film after the immaculately directed We Need to Talk About Kevin, von Trier’s direction of the first part simply comes across as sloppy and lazy. Whilst Vinterberg’s similar direction worked brilliantly in Festen, the contrast with the the prelude and the later sections, where we are viewing an expressionist landscape, is just too great a contrast.
There are many references in the film; the above image, with Wagner’s Liebestod dominant on the soundtrack, reminded me of Bunuel-Dali’s Un Chien Andalou (France, 1929) and Hamlet’s Ophelia tangentially appears in an image of Justine floating on a river and a painting of the scene is shown. Chien Andalou is about an ‘amour fou’ and Ophelia goes mad because of love. The name Justine reminds up of Marquis de Sade’s character, the ‘good sister’ suggesting that she is one with knowledge unlike the ‘sane’ Claire. In addition, the mansion, and its gardens, reference Last Year in Marienbad (France 1961), Alain Resnais’ engimatic film, which might be about a love affair that never happened. If nothing else, von Trier is cineliterate.
That said, this is a film of tremendous imagination that, at its best, touches brilliance.
There’s a Hollywood tradition of the ‘returning vet’ film (a testament to the number of wars America gets into) and these are often, understandably, noir in nature. This British contribution eschews expressionist visual style in favour of handheld realism and a clear social milieux in the North East of England. Add the fact that the vet is female and you can see that writer-director Brian Welsh is doing something interesting.
He also gets excellent performances, crucial in ‘realist’ films; especially from Joanne Froggatt in the lead. Her trauma relates to a child and badly affects her relationship with her young daughter. This maternal specificity takes a little away from dealing with a woman’s experience: why does it have to be through the role of a mother that we investigate a woman’s psychology? But that’s a minor quibble.
I didn’t like the ending either but don’t let that put you off seeking out this heartfelt, and telling, condemnation of war. How many children of the politicians manufacturing these wars have served?
Antonio Banderas and Elena Anaya in 'The Skin I Live In'
As European auteurs go, Pedro Almodóvar is arguably now the master and perhaps the only consistent performer over a long period. Ever since his 1988 film Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown introduced his work to an English-speaking audience, Almodóvar has produced a non-stop stream of controversial and increasingly well-made titles. At first the new titles in the 1990s ran alongside the earlier films (getting their delayed UK/Us release) with their wild plots and equally wild presentations. The more recent films have tended to turn back towards the plot ideas of the earlier films but to present them in extremely controlled productions full of exquisite design ideas – the list of brand names at the end of this latest film is longer than the cast list.
It’s relatively rare for Almodóvar to turn to a previously published property as the basis for his narrative but here he takes a novel by a French television writer Thierry Jonquet. The original novel seems to have had a complex story which Almodóvar filleted and then reconstructed as something recognisable but quite different. The still complex plot has stimulated quite a lot of discussion about who did what to whom and for what reason, but it seems to me that the machinations of the plot are the least interesting aspect of the film. Although I was engaged throughout I wasn’t really interested in the plot which for me didn’t particularly work as a thriller or an emotional melodrama. Instead the plot simply provided a narrative framework on which to hang a set of discourses about gender, genre and the work of several great filmmakers who Almodóvar admires. The central discourse is the mark of the auteur – a reflection by Almodóvar on his own career.
There are plenty of sites out there discussing various plot spoilers. I’d ignore them and instead read the Press Pack in which Almodóvar gives his typical statement about what lay behind his decision to make the film. (Download from this page.) I don’t really want to promote auteurism as a way of approaching films but with Almodóvar I don’t really think there is any other option. As I watched The Skin I Live In, one part of my brain was struggling to understand what I was seeing and another part was reflecting on my memories of the rest of the director’s work. The third part, concerned about what the narrative might mean in terms of contextual issues was lagging some way behind. (Though it does seem to me that Spanish films – and Almodóvar’s in particular, do seem to explore medical scenarios rather more often than might be expected.)
A young Banderas with Victoria Abril playing the woman he has kidnapped in 'Atame!'.
Let’s begin with one of the two central characters, Robert (why the English name?) Legard played by Antonio Banderas. This is Banderas’ first appearance for Almodóvar since he went to Hollywood a couple of years after starring, with Victoria Abril, in Átame!(Tie Me Up, Tie Me Down!) in 1990. There are elements of that film referenced in The Skin I Live In but now Banderas is the older figure. In his youth he appeared in several roles in which his sexual orientation was sometimes in doubt. Opposite him is Elena Anaya, a beautiful younger actress previously in smaller roles for Almodóvar and making up the central three is Marisa Paredes, another Almodóvar regular. In one of her earlier roles she plays a famous singer who returns to Spain from a long stint in Argentina and her daughter (played by Victoria Abril) takes her to a club where she is being impersonated by a drag queen. This is Tacones lejanos (High Heels, 1991), which offers several interesting family relationships and again seems to inform the new film in some way. Take the two older films together and we can see a discourse not only about gender difference but specifically about body modification, men controlling and restraining women and characters/stars ‘performing’ different roles.
Plots and genres
This is one of those Hitchcockian plots with twists that shouldn’t really be revealed, so I’ll stick with simply explaining the set-up. Vera (Elena Nayana) appears to be held prisoner in a tastefully-designed room. She is dressed in a ‘nude’ body stocking and doesn’t look particularly distressed as she performs yoga exercises. She receives her meals via a dumb-waiter sent up from the kitchen below by Marilia (Marisa Paredes). A title sets up the next location as ‘Toledo, 2012′ – the slightly futuristic setting suggesting a ‘speculative fiction’ of some kind. Banderas/Ledgard is addressing an academic audience on the topic of ‘artificial skin’ and the possibilities of genetic modification. Ledgard has a private operating theatre and research lab so the possibility here is that the narrative will develop in the direction of horror/science fiction. We seem to be in some form of ‘wealthy scientist with a dubious research goal’ territory. But this is an Almodóvar film and melodrama can only be a sumptously designed step away. If Vera is the laboratory subject (‘Vera’ is a name derived from the Latin ‘veritas’ – ‘truth’), Marilia is the scientist’s faithful servant, but we don’t expect Marisa Paredes to have a minor role and indeed she doesn’t. She is the link to the melodrama.
Dana Andrews in Fritz Lang's 'While the City Sleeps' (1956)
My feeling about what follows is that it is meticulously confected, both in its presentation of the melodrama through performances and mise en scène (and with a wonderful score by Alberto Inglesias) and in the twists and turns of the thriller narrative that melds horror and science fiction. I enjoyed seeing Antonio Banderas in a performance in which at times he strongly resembled Dana Andrews, the Hollywood star who appeared in Fritz Lang’s last two Hollywood films and who might be seen as representing the disturbed male characters of film noir. This isn’t too surprising since Almodóvar tells us that :
“A story of these characteristics made me think of Luis Buñuel, Alfred Hitchcock, all of Fritz Lang’s films (from the gothic to the noir). I also thought of the pop aesthetic of Hammer horror, or the more psychedelic, kitsch style of the Italian giallo (Dario Argento, Mario Bava, Umberto Lenzi or Lucio Fulci . . . ) and of course the lyricism of Georges Franju in Eyes Without a Face.” (From the Press Notes)
Georges Franju on the set of 'Eyes Without a Face'
In the event, Almodóvar found himself trying to distil the essence of these influences without allowing the film to become a pastiche of any specific style. The result is a narrative so controlled that on a first viewing seems to me to have been drained of emotion with a resolution that is revealed too quickly. I suspect that many audiences are going to feel dissatisfied. Yet, there is so much going on in the mise en scène (especially in the large-scale reproductions of paintings that I thought I recognised, but the credits suggested not). There also seemed to be large holes in the complicated plot. The Skin I Live In is most definitely a melodrama in terms of its complex interrelationships of coincidence and its excessive use of colour, music and performance, but its cold and, yes, ‘clinical’ tone demands that we think carefully about the meanings that it produces. So, a beautifully executed exercise in filmmaking from a master – but not on first viewing a satisfying entertainment? What does everyone else think?
The ‘teaser’ trailer that doesn’t give too much away:
What can you say about a film when you admire its message and dislike its way of telling? It’s both good and bad, I suppose. This terrific story about a social worker who discovers that 130,000 children were deported illegally, with governments’ connivance, from Britain to Australia and attempts to reunite them with their… well, it always seems to be mothers, but they must have had dads too. Therein lies one of the problems: the lack of detail.
The film suggests that, as in The Magdalene Sisters (Ire-UK, 2002), the children are the produce of ‘fallen women’ but I guess the destitute (as shown in the director’s dad’s Cathy Come Home, BBC, 1966) weren’t spared. There’s a great tale of class prejudice and exploitation here, the children were treated like slaves in Australia, but this is the story of Margaret Humphreys, the amazing woman who brought the injustice to light. Could you tell her tale and the political chicanery behind it? Possibly only via a documentary.
What we’re given is a blur of events; a massive sense of injustice; deep admiration for Humphreys and her long-suffering family. That’s a lot but, for me, it wasn’t enough. I think what the film lacks is a joining of the dots behind the events; however, as Humphreys’ story the film stands as an admirable testament. The deportations only ended in 1970, some of the people involved will still be alive and they should be DONE for what they did.
The Equality Commission report was published today stating that women are still earning 16% less than men; this followed a report, published in August, that suggested, at the current rate of progress, equal pay would occur in 2067. That’s one year shy of a century after the events portrayed in this film, which precipitated the Equal Pay Act. So it’s great to see this story being told and I could even forgive the ‘artistic license’ of having the women strip to their underwear because of the heat.
Channel 4 News got involved in the marketing of this film by taking the original ringleaders of the strike to meet Theresa May, the most prominent of only four women in Cameron’s cabinet. The reporter cajoled May to say that the women were right to strike; she wouldn’t but clearly without the right to strike workers would be even more exploited than they often are.
The script does well to pack in so much into the feelgood narrative: the snobbery of the Grammar school; the transition from communal to electronic music; the rise of sexy fashion at the expense of the frump; the imprisonment of middle class women in subordinate roles. Nigel Cole’s also has the odd flourish such as the long take when the wife of a Ford boss (Rosamund Pike) is dispatched to get the cheese and biscuits, her long walk to the kitchen is shown in full.
I also liked how the unions were portrayed as patriarchal, believing that the class struggle had no room for feminists. However it was the women, with Castle’s support, who took on the unions, and multinational companies, and scored a victory (albeit one that hasn’t delivered what it promised). It shows we shouldn’t be cowed by the thought of offending ‘big business’ (memo to Vince Cable: refer News Corp’s attempt to buy the 62% of Sky it doesn’t own to OFCOM).
Miranda Richardson, as Barbara Castle, seems to have been struggling for decent roles recently; a victim of being ‘old’ and female in film industry terms? However her brief appearances in the film are electric. And the cast, all round, take their opportunities with relish, offering some great ensemble acting.
I’m too young (or is that not quite old enough?) to remember 1968 clearly, but the period detail seemed to me to be genuine; though a friend reckoned the use of ‘fuck’, that’s given this film a 15-certificate, wasn’t used so prevalently at that time. I doubt whether many youngsters will be attracted to the film, and the audience I was in made me feel youthful, but it is one that they should see, particularly females.
