A radio bulletin in Jonathan Glazer’s grippingly eerie, intriguing and unsettling film tells us that this is a big year for Scotland: the Commonwealth Games, the Ryder Cup and the referendum on independence will all attract a great deal of public attention.
But the Scotland Scarlett Johansson’s unnamed character inhabits in Under The Skin is far removed from all that.
And the last thing she wants is public attention as, wearing a black wig and a fur coat, she cruises some of Glasgow’s drearier streets looking to lure single young men into her shabby white van under the pretext of needing directions. She then drives them to a derelict house.
Out of this world: There is manifestly nothing human about Scarlett Johansson’s character, yet her immersion in our world does seem to ignite some kind of emotion
They think their luck’s in. And yet their luck is very much out.
Johansson is a 21st-century version of a woman as old as fiction itself: the femme fatale. Even in the 8th century BC, Homer had his sirens, who lured sailors on to the rocks with their seductive songs.
Johansson is a sci-fi siren, an alien about whom we know very little, bar the fact she has adopted human form and uses not her singing voice as a lethal weapon but her sexiness. She is a most singular embodiment of an old Scottish expression: ‘Aw fur coat an’ nae knickers.’
Is she simply an extraterrestrial psychopath, or does she have an ulterior motive for wanting to kill these men?
It doesn’t really matter. What is captivating about this film is the convincing way it presents our own familiar, prosaic world. And what could be more prosaic than seeing BHS on Sauchiehall Street, or Celtic fans streaming out of Parkhead on a dreich Saturday afternoon — but through alien eyes?
She looks beautiful, this alien, and she sounds as coolly English as Fiona Bruce, but she can’t make head nor tail of Tommy Cooper, for example, or Black Forest gateau. And as for the male orgasm, that is just plain weird.
For much of the film there is an undercurrent of dark humour. But its most powerfully shocking scene places her on a beach, where she is a dispassionate observer as an actual undercurrent causes a family tragedy.
Under her skin there is manifestly nothing human, yet her immersion in our world does seem to ignite some kind of emotion. When she picks up a lone man who turns out to be terribly disfigured, she seems moved by something approaching compassion.
Under The Skin is inspired by Michel Faber’s novel of the same name. The book was published in 2000, the year in which Glazer made his directorial debut with violent crime thriller Sexy Beast. He has made just one feature since then: Birth in 2004.
Otherwise, he has been making adverts and trying to get Under The Skin off the ground. It is worth every moment of its long gestation.
Captivating: Scarlett Johansson’s unnamed alien travels through Glasgow, picking up men and sending them back to her home planet for food
Cleverly, Glazer chose to dispense with key elements of the book, in which the alien temptress has a name, Isserley, and a body that does not bear close human scrutiny. The novel uses daft alien words — ‘ten thousand liss for a fillet of vodissin’ — and explains why Isserley needs young men: they are to be shipped back to her distant planet as food.
Stripping the film of all this does not undermine its coherence, but rather adds to the eeriness, as does Mica Levi’s plaintive score.
A sinister motorcyclist keeps popping up to show that Johansson’s predator is not alone, but she never engages with anyone who knows what she is, or what she isn’t, at least until the final disturbing scene.
Not everyone will love Under The Skin. Indeed, after it aired at the Venice Film Festival, one critic damned it with just a single star out of five, calling it ‘blinkered’ and ‘perplexing’.
But I think it is worth the full complement, and for all kinds of reasons, beginning with the superficial one that it is a pleasure to find at least one alien landing on this side of the Atlantic. They normally touch down in California.
Beyond that, Johansson is wonderful in a part that requires her to stifle all human impulses and compounds her ever-burgeoning reputation as an actress who relishes a challenge.
It is even more to her credit, and Glazer’s, that several of the young men she picks up had not the slightest idea they were in a film. She was hiding under her black wig and the crew were hiding in the back of the van.
So if their responses to being invited into the passenger seat seem real, it’s because they are. We can only guess at the seesaw of emotions when they learnt that (a) their driver was Scarlett Johansson, and (b) they definitely weren’t going to sleep with her.
Source:https://www.dailymail.co.uk
