★★★☆☆
Three Stars

‘Under the Skin’ is a difficult film to review. It goes against so many cinematic norms that you begin to wonder whether it’s really appropriate to judge the film by any of the normal standards. Generally you tend to judge art films by how well they capture or evoke some aspect of what (in very high flown terms) it means to be human. Well, ‘Under the Skin’ seems to invert that whole notion; it is a film about what it means not to be human. On every level the film seems calculated to deny any kind of humanising impulse, to make the viewing experience truly ‘alien’.

The film begins with several minutes of mysterious concentric circles moving ominously to a strange backing track, you guess they are planets aligning or parts of a machine slotting into place; only to discover that you have in fact been watching the formation of an eye. It’s a neat synecdoche for what the film does as a whole, make deeply strange the seemingly ordinary and human. Throughout the rest of the film we are forced to some extent to see our world through the eyes of Scarlet Johansson’s alien.

The film was shot on the streets of Glasgow with specially made, hidden cameras; many of the shots look like something out of a BBC News segment and many of her interactions are with ordinary Glaswegians, unaware at the time that they are being filmed. Yet, the way it is all cut together and structured gives a very strange perspective to this ‘hyper-realist’ footage. There is nothing in the way of a plot for the viewer to grab onto, no sense that her actions are leading up to anything. We just watch her drive aimlessly around Glasgow in her white van, flirting with random men and occasionally managing to bring them back to her lair and convert them into food.

She meets so many men, and each disappears from the screen within such a short period of time, that we are denied real insight and the chance of empathy. This has a dehumanising effect, we begin to see these ordinary people in the same detached manner as the alien. Their deaths don’t seem especially tragic because the film has strenuously avoided extending our sympathies. The alien is herself an enigma, with Johansson conveying a real sense of something unfathomable hiding just under the skin. We just watch on, intrigued but coldly distanced, unable to empathise with what is going on in front of us; a case of ‘Verfremdungseffekt/Alienation’ if ever there was one. Towards the end the film moves into more empathetic terrain with scenes involving Johansson contemplating her naked body in the mirror or choosing not to kill a deformed man she seems to show kindness to. Still, any insight remains oblique in the extreme, and it is clear by the end that we have gained as little understanding of this alien as she has of humanity.

Presumably you’re reading this review to find out whether this is a film you’re going to enjoy watching. To be honest, I’m not sure ‘enjoy’ is the right word to describe the experience of watching this film. It was definitely very interesting, but it is also such a deliberately alienating experience that emotionally it feels rather muted. Certainly anyone just looking for the “tits n’ terror” that the setup seems to promise will be pretty disappointed, the seduction scenes are purposefully mechanical and unerotic while throughout there is very little in the way of suspense.

Still, it is a hugely innovative work made in a time of deep rooted conservatism and stasis in the film industry. It represents a fully formed and ambitious artistic statement, and I think ultimately deserves your support. There is a hauntingly austere beauty to it, the likes of which I’ve never seen before. Many of its images will stay with you for days.

★★★★★

Marie has not seen her husband Ahmed for four years. At the airport, on the other side of a glass wall, she smiles and waves at him with a bandaged hand. At first he does not see her, and in the moments that follow, we perceive feelings of trepidation behind her smiling mask. She checks herself, and begins to wave with the other hand. It is difficult to tell what both of them really feel upon seeing each other after so long, and Ahmed struggles as they try to communicate through the glass, smiling guardedly at each other. 

This is, as we discover, only the first of the difficulties these characters will have in trying to communicate. Ahmed moved to Iran after he and his wife separated, and Marie has now asked him to come to Paris in order to finalise their divorce. Marie is currently in a relationship with Samir, a dry-cleaner working nearby, and he and his young son Fouad have moved in with Marie and her children – Lucie (who has recently started causing problems for her mother) and her younger sister Léa. Marie has failed to tell Ahmed this, and has not booked Ahmed a hotel, instead insisting that he stay with them, so that he can talk to Lucie and try to find out what is wrong with her. We discover that Marie asked him to come once before to Paris in order to settle the divorce, a journey which he cancelled. Ahmed, in turn, feels awkward about having to share a room with another man’s son, and about the changes that are in the process of being made in the house where he used to live with Marie (the characters literally have to mind how they step, for fear of disturbing the paint). These details are only preliminary, and may not, you might think, be very important to the development of the plot. And yet they are established so carefully, so early in the film, to set up a delicate atmosphere of emotional tension, providing the basis for the drama that slowly ensues. 

I find it frightening to think how long it would have taken for Asghar Farhadi’s films to reach a UK audience had he not won the Golden Bear in 2011 for ‘A Separation’. Only now are his previous films being released. ‘About Elly’ was arrived in UK cinemas, … years after its international premiere, and ‘Fireworks Wednesday’ has only very recently followed it; there are still more to come. At a time when even some of the best films subjugate their characters and plots to predictable formulas, Farhadi’s films are a marvel. 

Lesser directors handling this sort of material would throw in the towel relatively early on, falling back on formulaic sentiment and easy catharsis in order to manipulate the audience’s emotions. Farhadi cares too much about his characters for that kind of cop-out, and this is perhaps why I am convinced that he is incapable of making a terrible film. All of his films are technically accomplished, and yet the cinematography never draws attention to itself. Even the weather in this film is usually overcast – punctuated by sudden downpours (providing obvious analogies with the development of the plot itself). Farhadi combines the technical ability of Hitchcock with the close observation and cultural awareness of the Japanese masters, Ozu and Mizoguchi. It is a unique hybrid. 

They are all slow-burning character pieces, establishing characters and their relationships very carefully, before something terrible occurs and the tensions within those relationships rear their ugly heads with renewed force. ‘The Past’ may very well be Farhadi’s most sophisticated creation, particularly in terms of writing. It differs from his previous work insofar as the monumental event which so much of the tension ostensibly revolves around happened (you guessed it) in the past. The audience, importantly, never see it. The major undercurrents of tension, therefore, have already been in play long before the film begins, and it is Ahmed’s arrival for what should be a perfunctory signing of papers which causes these tensions to come to the surface. 

I say it is important that the past event in question is never seen. Truth and guilt are major themes in all of Farhadi’s work, and the complexities surrounding these themes arise from subjective distortions of the truth. The emotions of his characters are buried, and only come to light peace-meal throughout his films – and even then, we can never be completely sure of them. This kind of film-making requires a strong cast – you may see films of Farhadi’s that are worse comparatively than others, but you will never see a badly-acted film with his name attached. The three leads here – Bérénice Bejo, Tahar Rahim and Ali Mosaffa – all put in brilliantly restrained performances; when their tempers flare, the result is gut-wrenching. Bejo in particular puts in her finest performance to date, deservedly winning Best Actress at Cannes last year. The children are equally mesmeric – Elyes Aguis often steals the show as Fouad, a conflicted and vulnerable young boy. 

At the end of his films, little is resolved. What truths the characters know are revealed, but Farhadi is wise about truth and morality. Truth can only be taken so far before we begin to hit murky grey areas. His characters get themselves into complicated moral entanglements, and Farhadi does not judge or try to help them – he observes, and then leaves it up to us to make sense of where we stand. One of the difficulties his characters face in this film lies in trying to deduce what a person felt at a specific moment in their past, as their guilt festers well into the present. The final scene may hint at an answer to some of our questions, but what it will mean for the characters remains ambiguous. 

Earlier this week, tickets to Kate Bush’s 22 performances sold out in a mere 15 minutes. Despite the ‘Wuthering Heights’ singer not touring since 1979, the rate at which seats in the 5000-capacity Hammersmith Apollo were snatched up (to the disappointment of hoards of heartbroken fans across social media), is astonishing. Since the last tour, the 55 year old from Bexley has released seven original studio albums, whilst also, allegedly, providing inspiration to a plethora of artists from KT Tunstall to Tupac Shakur. Although there’s always a slight uncertainty over long-awaited comebacks, the long career break has only added to the anticipation. Let’s take this opportunity to look back at some of the other great re-emergences of our time (great in terms of the hype/anticipation/publicity expenditure). Success isn’t always as sweet the second time round.

 
1) David Bowie

Ziggy Stardust’s alter ego (oh…wait) announced a new album on his 66th birthday after a 10 year hiatus and serious health scares. The Next Day, spearheaded by its lead single ‘Where Are We Now’ was unanimously well received, securing Bowie’s image as a renaissance man well into the 21st century. In February, he became the oldest ever recipient of a Brit award last year.
  

2) Vanilla Ice

A true travesty in many ways. Known almost exclusively for the leading single ‘Ice Ice Baby’off his debut album, much of the troubled rapper’s other output quickly faded into obscurity, and the decision in 2010 to record his newly massacred hit ‘Under Pressure (Ice Ice Baby)’ with Jedward didn’t help.

3) Guns n’ Roses

In 2008, my early days of using Facebook, Chinese Democracy hit the shelves — the band’s first studio album since 1993. It took the crazed status of one particular Facebook ‘friend’ (since unfriended, blocked and on the other side of the planet), for me to be persuaded to buy the album, because what people talked about on Facebook was cool without exception. It took only a brief listen to realise that I had bought the parched sound of rocking pensioners attempting to make a come back despite struggling to keep it together in general. Unexceptional and purely riding on some pseudo-philosophical oxymoron of an album title.

4) Johnny Cash

The sentiment about rocking pensioners fades to black. More specifically, the man in black. The legendary country singer kept recording during his twilight years, despite deteriorating health and decades of personal trouble, including spells in prison and prolific drug abuse. Whilst most of his later albums consisted of covers, Cash made them his own, arguably culminating in 2002’s American IV: The Man Comes Around — an explosive yet dignified lament of his troubled life, expressed through powerful lyrics. Recordings of the singer, posthumously discovered, are still being released.

5) Van Halen
 
 An controversial one. The hard rock band’s album 1984 contains the quintessential stadium rock anthems, but 2012’s A Different Kind Of Truth proved to be nothing special at all. Those of you listening to Spotify or watching TV pre 6pm would have been bombarded by the promotion campaign — but still, the band’s activity subsided thereafter. 

6) Train

Although the band’s hiatus was only 3 years long, after 2006’s For Me, It’s You it looked as if the group’s star had faded. Cue 2009’s Save Me San Francisco, and the pop rock band received renewed interest, spawning hits like the cheese floor regular ‘Hey Soul Sister’, and a venture into the wine business. Seriously, different wines named after their various “hits”.

 7) Britney Spears

Whilst there was no particular turning point in the troubled singer’s career, various problems appear to have taken their toll continuously since the timeless success of ‘Baby One More Time’. Latest album Britney Jean also failed to turn both critical and commercial heads, and charted low despite extensive promotion. Cue recent attempts at resurgence, from that disastrous MTV award show dance to becoming an X-Factor judge and taking up residency in Planet Hollywood Las Vegas — a move usually reserved for veteran entertainers on their way out of the business.

8) Nile Rodgers
 
The Funk music legend has recaptured and arguably topped the success in the 1970s with his band Chic by becoming a producer to huge names and more recently helping send Daft Punk’s Random Access Memories soaring with his unforgettable guitar riffs.

9) Cee Lo Green

After ‘Crazy’ went from classic to unbearably overplayed in 2006, Gnarls Barkley’s follow up The Odd Couple in 2008 didn’t make many waves, save some of its singles being played in the background of car adverts. Cue his 2010 solo effort The Lady Killer headed by the instant classic ‘F*** You’, and a resurgence of himself and his group The Goodie Mob. As well as the inevitable result of younger siblings everywhere learning their first profanity.

10) Cher
 
Right, this one’s a bit of a long shot, but those who still remember Cher taking Top of The Pops by storm in 1997 with ‘Do You Believe in Love’? After trailing towards the end of the 80s, you should at least be impressed by her arsenal of talents (she even won an Oscar for a film in which she starred opposite Nicholas Cage in the lead – yes, she was that good) and her accolades over the decades. Not to mention that role she played in the dazzlingly shit film Burlesque with Christina Aguilera. Plus, she’s been made an honorary member of the St Anne’s College JCR (her PR team have yet to formally acknowledge this particular honour), which clearly trumps everything else.

Justice secretary Chris Grayling’s recent prison policy has caused uproar, meeting with almost universal criticism. If you’ve missed the fuss, Grayling has brought in a new policy which sets up a scheme of rewards and privileges for prisoners. A reasonable enough idea perhaps, except that it effectively bans friends from sending parcels to prisoners – the philosophy being that you can’t have what you haven’t earned. This, of course, includes book.

The heavyweights of the literary world, the likes of Salman Rushdie, Philip Pullman, and Carol Ann Duffy have thrown themselves into the row in protest, calling it ‘vindictive’ and ‘disgusting’, and printing a letter in the Telegraph reading ‘whilst we understand that prisons must be able to apply incentives to reward good behaviour by prisoners, we do not believe that education and reading should be part of that policy.

‘Books represent a lifeline behind bars, a way of nourishing the mind and filling the many hours that prisoners spend locked in their cells. In an environment with no internet access and only limited library facilities, books become all the more important.’

As one might imagine, shadow justice secretary Sadiq Khan has done his bit, saying that if it wanted ‘to truly rehabilitate prisoners David Cameron’s government would be encouraging reading, not making it more difficult than it already is’. This is not just political scrapping. There is good evidence that Khan is right, and that a system which limits prisoners’ reading effectively shoots itself in the foot.

The evidence comes from an unlikely direction – Texas. With one of the highest incarceration rates in the world, and a state which still allows the death penalty, it seems an odd place to look when the matter of penal systems arises. Or does it? In such an environment, it becomes clear that prisons aren’t working, with judges seeing the same people coming round again and again. This is what kick-started a program called ‘Changing Lives Through Literature’ (CLTL); instead of prison, a six week reading course is offered.

The results are astonishing. One of the first experiments with the scheme, carried out by the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, found that only 18% of those who completed the course reoffended, compared to the control group’s 42%. The cost per offender was only $500. In Britain, the reoffending rate is less drastic, 27%, but one does have to wonder whether we are pouring money into a system which is a deterrent only, with little focus on rehabilitation.

The CLTL scheme is of course fairly radical. But the benefits of reading to the cause of rehabilitation are becoming more and more widely recognised. In 2012, Brazil introduced a scheme whereby for each work of literature, science or philosophy read, an inmate reduces his or her sentence by four days. Part of the idea is simply to increase literacy levels. With over half of UK prisoners having a reading age of an eleven-year-old, and many illiterate altogether, it seems there is something for us to learn from this. Indeed, schemes by the Shannon Trust already promote this cause, teaching basic literacy to inmates.

In limiting access to reading material, the government is surely taking a step backwards, going against the tide of penal systems across the world. Sure, prisoners still have access to the limited prison libraries, and they can still buy books, with money earned through labour, but it is hard to imagine, with £10-15 per week, that even the most literary of inmates will realistically spend it this way. If a reward system is to be introduced, books, a tool for rehabilitation if ever there was one, should be set apart from it.

★★★★☆

The audience is introduced to Eric Love, a young offender so prolifically violent he has been transferred (starred up) to an adult prison, as he is stripped naked, bent over and subjected to an anal cavity search. Starred Up establishes its agenda early on, to provide an unflinching, uncensored portrait of life inside. In a week that saw widespread public outrage at the debacle of justice secretary Chris Grayling’s ban on books and other small gifts being sent to prisoners, a film that asks searching questions about the model of rehabilitation offered by the UK’s prison system feels incredibly relevant.

The film is an intensely close scrutiny of the physical and the psychological experience of incarceration, a closeness that evokes the claustrophobia of confinement. On the one hand, Starred Up captures the corporeality of prisons, alluding to Foucault, who saw imprisonment as entailing ‘an additional element of punishment that certainly concerns the body itself”. This acute awareness of the body is present in the regulation of food, used as means of concealing drugs and other contraband, in the repression of sexuality,and above all, in the violence that, if not physically enacted, is present below the surface in virtually every scene. Eric’s sense of self has been entirely determined by his physical strength, as an institutionalized serial offender, failed by the care system, his body provides him with his only agency or means of self-expression. Ex-Skins alumnus Jack O’Connell exudes physicality and volatility in a performance that sees him slashing a fellow inmate with a makeshift knife, taking on guards in riot gear with a broken table-leg, and, at his most feral, savaging a guard’s scrotum with his teeth. Starred Up is not for the faint-hearted, but neither is a prison sentence.

However, despite these Kubrick-esque orgies of ultraviolence, it is often the silences that have the greatest power to disturb. The film’s minimal soundtrack and the recurrent sequences of prisoners alone in their cells, quiet and listless, tangibly suggest the horror of isolation. If this emphasis on alienation and monotony is sometimes at the expense of plot, we must again refer to Starred Up’s agenda, as explicitly stated by the film’s director David McKenzie: ‘We want the audience to feel like they’re in jail’. In one of the most devastating moments in the entire film, Eric, left alone for the first time in his new cell, contorts his face as if to scream, before quietly placing his head in his hands, as if acknowledging the futility of crying out to nothingness. The film is always concerned to root the explosive, sinewy displays of violence in trauma and vulnerability; on his first day in jail, standing alone in the exercise yard, Eric is more lost schoolboy than hardened criminal.

This psychological validity is also present in the nuanced portraits of the prisoners’ relationships. There is little of Shawshank Redemption’s cheerful, Hollywood prison camaraderie. All the relationships are dark, twisted, and thwarted by the environment in which they develop. The emotional breakthroughs in the group therapy sessions, where the prisoners are briefly allowed to feel “part of something”, are constantly threatened by outbreaks of verbal and physical aggression. These meetings move from a thoughtful meditation on “how prison fucks you up” to crude “your mum” insults and racial slurs in a breathless acceleration of pace that characterizes Starred Up’s stop-start trajectory. The veracity of these portraits was informed by the film’s writer, Jonathan Asser’s, own experiences as a voluntary counselor at HMP Wandsworth. As the film progresses, the most important relationship is that of Eric and Neville, a nod to the prison-drama trope of paternal relationships that are readily formed in a male-dominated cast. Indeed, the Governor’s suggestion that Neville should act as a father-figure to Eric is playfully literalized in the revelation that Neville is actually his estranged biological father. An Oedipal struggle ensues, culminating in a fight scene as brutal as any other, before an ultimate reconciliation which is perhaps the only weak, sentimental note of the entire film, after Neville saves Eric from a dramatic murder attempt staged as a suicide by the prison’s sinister Deputy Governor.

The ending of the film may be unsatisfying in the traditional sense; we leave Eric as abruptly as we were introduced to him. Starred Up’s strength lies, however, not in any conventional formulation of plot or drama, but in its direct interrogation of the archaic social values of a penal system in which our protagonist is denied therapy on the grounds that he is ‘too violent’ and in which psychological trauma and disorder are exacerbated rather than addressed. Starred Up, by providing a compelling portrait of a world always obscured from the view of mainstream society,challenges the assumption that any human being, even those who have committed the most socially abhorrent crimes, is beyond help and rehabilitation.