→ A Movies By Women.com Article

→ Under The Skin, directed by Carine Adler

by Sarah Jacobson

Whenever you see a film with the words "destructive sexual journey of a woman" in the description, you can almost always bet on a gruesome rape scene that leads to the woman's bloody death. Luckily, Carine Adler's Under the Skin is the perfect antidote for the Looking-for-Mr.-Goodbar-"liberated woman" syndrome. Adler delves deeply into a girl's "destructive sexual journey" and shows that women can explore the dark side of sex without succumbing to total self destruction.

Under the Skin is a powerful, resonating story about a 19 year old girl, Iris (fearlessly played by Samantha Morton), who goes on a fucking spree after her mother dies. Her sister, Rose - 'the favorite' (Claire Rushbrook from Secrets and Lies) has all the right responses and all the sympathy. She's very pregnant, very married, very stable in her life and career and very...perfect. But in all her 'right' responses, sibling rivalry seethes under the surface. Where Rose is always logical and proper, Iris is pure emotion and impulse. We can see all of Iris' flaws as she quits her job at a lingerie shop, breaks up with her boyfriend, moves into a just-above-Skid-Row hotel and starts to pick up strange men.

Instead of judging Iris, however, we identify with her. We get to explore what it's like to do all the wrong things - to be callous and selfish, loose and slutty, to throw around the female power of sexuality only to have it boomerang back and slap us right in the ass. It is so rare in films to follow a woman grappling with very complex emotions of grief, power, sex, hate, insecurity and respect, especially when they're all intertwined.

At one point Iris gets a call from one of her 'men.' Over the phone, she seduces him, talks dirty to him and in the process has him completely wrapped around her little finger. After he's come, he thanks her quickly and hangs up the phone, leaving her feeling lonely and rejected. The whole time the camera is only on Iris, the man is just a voice. What started out as a release slowly becomes a trap.

As Iris' escapades get more and more risky (at the same time she gets a job in a lost property office), she is testing the limits of how far she can push it, how reckless she can be. Like most girls, she internalizes her pain instead of lashing out. Her reaction to her grief is on the same level as anorexia, bulimia and slicing your skin with a razor blade. In this light, Iris is not the Madonna or the Whore. She is three dimensional. She keeps reminds us of ourselves.

Throughout the film, Iris' increasingly sleazy existence is reflected in Rose's 'normal' eyes, making her adventures more thrilling in the light of disapproval. The sisters head for an emotional showdown, tautly playing our expectations of Rose's stable presence. Will it tear Iris apart or save her? Under the Skin is different and fresh because of its ability to explore sexuality in the context of a girl's place in her family. The only other example that comes to mind of a 'slut' having a family life was Allison Anders' Gas Food Lodging. And like Trudi in Gas Food Lodging, Iris finds her power not in her ability to seduce and sleep with men, but in her ability to relate to other women.

With all this raw sex and emotion flying about, it comes as kind of a shock that the director, Carine Adler, is no twenty-something headstrong film school gal using her first feature as therapy, but a woman in her forties with a son of her own. Under the Skin is her debut feature film. It's such a...new idea, to have an older woman deliver such a raw, visceral film about fucking. It's also probably one of the reasons that the film has so much depth and wisdom on the subject. Says Adler, "There's such a huge thing about being a young filmmaker, being in your twenties. I just tried to convey what that character would feel."

Adler has always worked with themes of "dramatic sexual situations" in her previous short films. One of her inspirations for Under the Skin was a book called Mother, Madonna, Whore by Dr. Estela Welldon. Instead of engaging the cast and crew in long, analytical feminist discussions, she chose actors and a DP who could instinctively gravitate to a raw, emotional style. Samatha Morton, who plays Iris, brings a rare immediateness to British acting, which tends to be very reserved and repressed. Instead of pushing Morton to break out, Adler found sometimes she had to pull her in. Morton's edginess fully realizes Adler's vision of who Iris was. "The character of Iris is quite cocky about sex. She thinks she's in control and I thought it was quite important that she doesn't come across as a victim. (I thought) she should be quite aggressive, rather than pathetic. She's young and thinks she's immune from anything."

Iris' emotions and unpredictability also comes across in Barry Ackroyd's hand held camera style, which gives the film a very subjective feeling. Ackroyd is mostly known mostly for his work with Ken Loach. For Under the Skin, Adler showed him pictures of Nan Goldin's and Cindy Sherman's photographs, there was very little discussion. Instinctually, he connected with the film's subtext. It's like Ackroyd's and Morton's impulse-driven work gives the film the exact same feeling as when you decide to do something that you know you shouldn't, but you can't help yourself.

Under the Skin has been receiving rave reviews. It won the Critic's Choice at Toronto this year and the Michael Powell Award at Edinburgh. But still, Adler is cautious about how the film will do at Sundance, her first time at the uber-festival. "I'm interested to know how American women will respond to the film. The sex isn't politically correct, is it? Human nature isn't really politically correct.

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