Under the Skin : Jonathan Glazer

 

Glazer's Under the Skin (2013) is another master piece from pages to screen originally written by Michel Faber. I have no great expectation to this adaptation but it pulled my nerve string byond imagination.

Explicitly it's a film on foreigness in a sense of alien body. I wonder when the foreign spirit skinned out as a tar black human body but with gender neutrality as it wasn't revealed. I am consistently wandering at a large scale that why writers can't think about alien organic body beyond anthropocentric. The world rounds the humans instead of the sun. The other living planet should be left out for non-anthropocentric forms, I suppose.

Implicitly the same otherness illustrated over so many gradual issues with the world is conflicted now. The prime thing is identifying the self and defining the personhood. When the girl saw herself in the mirror she being shocked by the beauty of her appearance. First time she failed to deliver her victim, the deformed facing man whom she thought of as other as herself but by his fellow people. The second time she got the identity crisis when she engaged in a sex act with the man who gave shelter and taught many worldly things. 

I got a uneasy feeling and almost cried watching the crying baby on the beach abandoned by the girl and the helper. It's a big  example of what will be happened if the world lacks compassion and consideration. Reversely the preceding scenes showed the deep strength of  human caring and sacrifice when the mother died for saving the dog, the father died for saving the mother and the swimmer died for saving the father. It's a great parable I have wathed in movies in recent times. 

I can relate the same degree of the  urgencey of compassion in the time of abandonment with Ruben Östlund's "Triangle of Sadness" (2022). The narrative adaptation in cinema just amazing.

Under the Skin (2013)

Jonathan Glazer

English, UK