In the film Under the Skin there is no story line or development of character(as in the book), the almost non-existent story must be created from what we see. Johansson plays a blank,humanoid void of personality, filling in (like us) the blanks of what she knows with what she sees. The stroke of genius was dropping an A-list star into the streets of Glasgow and her mixing with non actors using a Kiarostami-type -10 approach to filming in and from the white van, with all the sounds of the street filtering through. I wonder how much this film traded on Scarlet Johansson's celebrity glamour rather than her acting skills as she seems like a passive observer, almost mute, apart from a few encounters with stranger pick-ups on the streets, where the recognisable husky voice and seductive tone reels another unsuspecting victim into her lair. There are some brilliant,stunning visual effects, making the film realise the the alien presence with the eye image from the spherical globe, to the birth of her human identity in the all-white space, where she dons the victim's clothes and identity. The heroine knows how to drive a car and turn a sentence, and the use of red lip-stick as she kerb crawls.
The chipper lad, the cocksure charmer, the deformed lonely hearts are all lured in by this femme fa tale, siren of film noir luring them( friendless) into the cavern of blackness of her squat. The victims wade into a black intergalactic gloo as she walks on enticingly above. A mystery biker speeding the Scottish highways seems to aid and abet her, or monitor and supervise her. Is he her controller or is he her drone? All is accompanied by Mica Levi's eerie ominous drums and strings soundtrack. We don't know who she is, she doesn't even have a name. She has a mission, some of which she may not know herself. She even kills one victim with a rock when he's washed up on a beach trying to save two people in the sea. I'm not sure how much we are supposed to project onto her opaque performance glimmerings of consciousness, e. G. when she picks up a man at night suffering from facial disfigurement, whose loneliness and longing appear to affect her and she lets him live, then after she takes off for the Scottish highlands, her growing human awareness and vulnerability allows her to experience briefly a relationship and sex which shocks her. She is seen to explore her naked body, to wonder about its effects in a mirror. The ending is both matter-of-fact and tragic.
Glazer made it clear on this project of 9 years, he didn't want to make the novel, but make a film on what it means to feel human. The clever ploy is using the alien gaze to show us our own alienness back to us. How alien we would seem to an alien as how strange an alien would be to us in any encounter. He's on slippery ground. We cannot gainsay the beauty of non-verbal images, but this has no substance without a narrative thread. As a former director of music videos and TV commercials there is a slickness, he creates atmosphere and mood, but lacking dialogue or narrative, what does happen has a certain repetition and tedium, blankness and incomprehension, emptied as the story is of its intellectual content and relevant details. Still its Johansson's best yet. A very anti- Scarlett performance where she takes risks.
The chipper lad, the cocksure charmer, the deformed lonely hearts are all lured in by this femme fa tale, siren of film noir luring them( friendless) into the cavern of blackness of her squat. The victims wade into a black intergalactic gloo as she walks on enticingly above. A mystery biker speeding the Scottish highways seems to aid and abet her, or monitor and supervise her. Is he her controller or is he her drone? All is accompanied by Mica Levi's eerie ominous drums and strings soundtrack. We don't know who she is, she doesn't even have a name. She has a mission, some of which she may not know herself. She even kills one victim with a rock when he's washed up on a beach trying to save two people in the sea. I'm not sure how much we are supposed to project onto her opaque performance glimmerings of consciousness, e. G. when she picks up a man at night suffering from facial disfigurement, whose loneliness and longing appear to affect her and she lets him live, then after she takes off for the Scottish highlands, her growing human awareness and vulnerability allows her to experience briefly a relationship and sex which shocks her. She is seen to explore her naked body, to wonder about its effects in a mirror. The ending is both matter-of-fact and tragic.
Glazer made it clear on this project of 9 years, he didn't want to make the novel, but make a film on what it means to feel human. The clever ploy is using the alien gaze to show us our own alienness back to us. How alien we would seem to an alien as how strange an alien would be to us in any encounter. He's on slippery ground. We cannot gainsay the beauty of non-verbal images, but this has no substance without a narrative thread. As a former director of music videos and TV commercials there is a slickness, he creates atmosphere and mood, but lacking dialogue or narrative, what does happen has a certain repetition and tedium, blankness and incomprehension, emptied as the story is of its intellectual content and relevant details. Still its Johansson's best yet. A very anti- Scarlett performance where she takes risks.