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Directed by: Marina de Van Starring: Marina de Van, Laurent Lucas, Léa Drucker A disclaimer: I didn't finish this movie. It wasn't that it was poorly made or particularly nauseating; it just hits a certain stride and, like similar French films about self-discovery turning to self-destruction (HELLO "Romance"), the trajectory's pretty easy to predict. "In My Skin" ("Dans Ma Peau" in its native land) is about an otherwise "normal" woman who, after accidentally injuring herself at a party, starts cutting herself and, after obsessing over her business associates eating steak at a later dinner party, begins eating her own flesh and toenails. The behavior probably escalates to something else by the end of the movie, but whether de Van was trying to be shocking or just plain honest in her depiction of self-mutilation, there's a long sequence in the middle when her character checks herself into a hotel and just starts cutting and digging and eating. It's longer and more uncomfortable than the restraint scene in "Romance" and it's longer and less disturbing than "Irreversible," but there came a point where I just got bored with its film-school aesthetic and its film-school treatment of a film-school subject. The brain/body disconnect fascinates me as much as the next guy—I like to read about apotemnophilia and I think "Whole" should be expanded into a feature-length film—but de Van focuses too little on her character's psychological motivation and too much on the actual act. Without psychological motivation, the act isn't nearly as horrifying (unless you have phobias about cutting or cannibalism) and the film, if you substitute "gets into drugs" or "experiments with kinky sex" with "becomes increasingly fascinated with her own skin, how it severs and how it tastes," is the same as any other about a character who gets an addiction or a -philia and then goes on the downward spiral toward complete self-destruction. Hello, Marina de Van, it's loving boring by now to watch characters do this. It was boring when "Requiem for a Dream" did it, let alone when "Scarface" or "The Man with the Golden Arm" did it; those films only soared to excellence on the backs of talented filmmakers, and frankly, de Van isn't that talented. She doesn't know how to use her camera to achieve the kind of harrowing pathos other, better "addiction" films employ, and by that middle section, when de Van's character is curled up into the fetal position in some pay-by-the-hour motel, sucking on her own blood and tearing away skin to eat, it becomes laughable in the way that the final project of a film student, even a moderately promising film student, is laughable when it tries to tackle shocking subjects. RATING: 2.5 PROS: Interesting concept, good choice by de Van to treat this as a serious subject CONS: Third act of the movie plays out like a student film ADDITIONAL INFORMATION: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0337961/
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Mar 20, 2006 00:56
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