Scarlett Johansson's perfect n*-u*-d*-e in 'Under the skin'
The murky and bleak masterpiece that Jonathan Glazer presented in Venice in 2013 finally premieres on Spanish screens
In March 1914, suffragette Mary Richardson lashed out with a knife at Velázquez's Venus in the Mirror. She did it in an act of denunciation for the arrest of her partner Emmeline Pankhurst the day before. "I have tried to destroy the image of the most beautiful woman in mythological history as a protest against the destruction of Mrs. Pankhurst, the most beautiful character in modern history," she reasoned after being arrested.
In her subsequent statement, she expressed her revulsion at how the visitors (men) to the National Gallery stood before the representation of the goddess in an oil painting that, with the mirror turned towards the viewer, hides everything it shows. It seems that the painting itself is there for provocation. And from her hand, he denounces her. The intelligence with which she exhibits her power and her beauty makes the viewer be forced to take sides. Again, as in Las Meninas, what is at stake are the mechanisms of power and domination that move both the gaze and the representation itself.
To say that Under the skin, the already cult film signed by Jonathan Glazer and starring Scarlett Johansson that this Friday (seven years after its presentation at the Venice Film Festival) hits theaters, replicates in its own way the same earthquakes as the Oil of the Sevillian may sound exaggerated. Or just plain. Surreal perhaps. After all, the distance between the seventeenth-century canvas and the twenty-first-century science fiction film seems, as it happens, stratospheric. And yet, as soon as you look closely, both one, the painting, and another, the film, are there to shock, amazement and, if necessary, the senseless stabbing of each of the common places that we they supply common sense in everyday life.
Glazer had been obsessed with Michel Faber's novel published around the turn of the millennium for years. There, the story of an alien who lands among us to survive and, incidentally, undress each of our vices, is told in a satirical and very crude tone. Let's say that in the same way that we treat the animals that supply us with meat, she treats us. The fact that the protagonist is a woman also serves to uncover the mechanisms of a hunt for male homo sapiens that feeds on such poor nutritional components as sexism, the culture of rape or the objectification of women. Ultimately, it is about that; of leaving a good part of the mindless order that we have given ourselves naked that still devastates the planet that justifies and shamelessly legalizes the most bloody injustices. Obviously science fiction stuff.
HIDDEN CAMERA
When the director insisted on cleaning up the text in the company of his screenwriter Walter Campbell they diverted the focus or, better still, they concentrated it. Hand in hand with him, the film stops at the body of the protagonist. Or, more raw if you like, in her flesh wide open. Naked And there, between what he shows and hides, he succeeds in constructing a magisterial, cloudy and very sad fable about us.
Originally, Under the skin experienced a first blockbuster moment with Brad Pitt inside, seconded by an alien companion. As in the novel, the processing of human flesh would have to have an explicit and primary place. And so on, until the story went to the essence to let the suggestion (what is hidden) take center stage. As in his previous works, the British filmmaker plays at loosening, shredding and reconstructing genres in a meticulous, enveloping and magnetic exercise of the cinematographic pulse. Accurate and visionary. In his directorial debut, Sexy Beast, he turned a comedy into something much more uneasy, for years later, in Reincarnation, the film starring Nicole Kidman, to transform the keys of the fantastic into a semiautistic and deeply emotional and icy way of looking at the world.
Now everything is Scarlett Johansson who devours the camera as much as the viewer's own gaze. She, the superstar, acts as a catalyst. Men look at her and desire her in her dual role as woman and celebrity, as the men Mary Richardson spoke of probably contemplated, drowned in her drool, The Venus in the mirror. And she, the alien, eats them in return. Weakness is her strength. And backwards. Glazer made Johansson learn to drive the truck she picks up hitchhikers with, he fed her. Many of the shots were taken with a hidden camera with spontaneous people unable to recognize that they had been collected by one of the most sought-after actresses in Hollywood. There are no more professional actors than her. And it is there, in that contrast of looks that are replicated in a mirror like the one devised by Velázquez, where knives fly.
Each scene runs across the screen between hallucination and sleep supported by the music of Mica Levi that works as if giant nails were scratching the slate of the universe. The metaphor is of the composer. A kind of camera obscura submerges bodies in a black fluid that could well be blood from other worlds. Scarlett strips naked and offers herself entirely as Venus; she gets naked for the first time and only. She does it while punishing and condemning those who watch. She is a perfect cold nude; so perfect and frozen that she manages to see, as if it were a new stab from Ricahrdson, what is behind it. Us.
In the end, the journey that condemns the extraterrestrial is the same that condemns man: the discovery of humanity hidden in each of the weaknesses that define us. And they hurt us.
