Scrape your knee / It is only skin...
"Do you think this is a feminist film?" Teresa asked, about midway through Marina de Van's
In My Skin, her pick in our I-choose-one-you-choose-one double feature (I went with
Taste of Cherry, her first taste of Kiarostami).
"Yeah,...um, I mean, I guess so? It's definitely interesting..."
Teresa laughed. You see, we have this sort of running joke: She cringes at displays of overt feminism, while I--being a good, dyed-in-the-wool liberal and longtime
Sleater-Kinney fanboy--actively embrace that sort of fare. She feels no gender-tied obligation to fist-pump along with the type of grrl-power rhetoric that I inevitably swoon for. And she really likes
In My Skin, a determinedly nasty piece of provocation about a woman who enjoys eating her flesh.
De Van, who bares more than a passing resemblance to Beatrice Dalle (thus making it all the more difficult not to think of Claire Denis' poetic, if problematic,
Trouble Every Day while viewing
In My Skin), also wrote the film and is its star. But this is anything but a vanity project. Within the field of actor-directors, de Van's debut feature registers closest to (coincidentally)
Trouble Every Day co-star Vincent Gallo's controversial pair of efforts.
Like
Buffalo 66 and
The Brown Bunny,
In My Skin is earthy and mostly unshowy (despite a possibly pointless split-screen sequence) yet technically assured, decidedly unflattering (despite a bit of fetishistic nudity--though nothing on the level of an onscreen blowjob, ala Gallo!), and grimly funny. The most memorable scene in de Van's film involves a dinner meeting between business colleagues at a high-end Parisian restaurant. While the group debates the merits of various European cities--Lisbon, Rome, Milan, Paris--de Van's Esther imagines her severed lower arm sitting on the table and then proceeds to slash her arm with a knife, eager to taste the raw skin.
Perhaps the filmic subset that
In My Skin best occupies is that of inexplicable female masochism. Think: Haneke's
The Piano Teacher, Desplechin's
Esther Kahn, almost everything von Trier's made since
Breaking the Waves. But, and this is key, those films were directed by men, and are subsequently ripe for accusations of misogyny--or at least "issues with women." De Van directed herself here and scripted the source.
In My Skin's narrative progresses in fits and starts, and mostly when Esther cuts herself. This is a film about how it
feels to be addicted to something. De Van's selected "something" just happens to be less commonplace than cigarettes or drinking or drugs or gambling or sex: Esther lives from slice to slice, clearly on edge when unable to partake or when questioned about her new fixation. The lack of exposition and mere suggestions of psychological empathy ultimately lend the material its haunting, unshakable weight.
In My Skin also strikes me as a perceptive portrait of an artist's courtship with her art--here represented rather more, ahem, extremely than in, say,
8 1/2 or
Vertigo. It's still a (voyeuristic) look at the privacy demanded by the process of creating something; De Van simply literalizes the self-devouring nature of personal art. In the film's unsettling final shot, it's up to the viewer to determine whether Esther is still alive--or if she is, whether she will be for much longer. And, credits rolling,
In My Skin, the deeply personal and deeply disturbing fruit of Marina de Van's creative process, is complete. As Polly Jean Harvey put it, "I've laid with the devil/cursed god above/forsaken heaven/to bring you my love." Maybe, finally, this is about the rigorous cost of creation, the toll paid in putting the personal to celluloid (or record).
So, the earlier question still lingers: Is
In My Skin a feminist film? Yeah,...um, I mean, I guess so? It's definitely interesting...
