Film screening: Under the Skin

DESCRIPTION

A mysterious and attractive brunette is traveling in a white van around Glasgow and its suburbs, meeting male hitchhikers and offering them a ride. Once hooked, fellow travelers find themselves in some black vacuum, drowning in a liquid, as smooth as oil. Their insides are removed and transported in an unknown direction, with only skin remaining from the bodies. As one might guess, the brunette is neither quite a woman nor quite a human being.

A screen adaptation of Michel Faber's eponymous satirical sci-fi novel about a race of alien hunters who call themselves "humans" and eat "meat," the flesh of earthlings, the film by the British director Jonathan Glazer (Sexy Beast, Birth) is much less verbose compared to the book, its fictional narration full of almost documentary episodes, filmed with hidden cameras with the participation of bystanders. Featuring mainly non-professional actors, Under the Skin's only star is Scarlett Johansson, whose protagonist looks at our habitual world with the eyes of a total stranger. With the horror of irrecognition, she observes the human world, which looks familiar and incomprehensible at the same time. The paradox lies in her subjective perspective and simultaneous impenetrability. In the essay Inside out: outside in: Margaret Atwood and Jonathan Glazer, theorist Mark Fisher wonders if she has any kind of "inner life" at all and can experience emotions in the human sense.

After the screening at the 2013 Venice Film Festival, the picture drew polarizing media responses, but even the most implacable opponents recognized it as visually brilliant. Over the years, its reputation has only strengthened: Under the Skin is often featured in the lists of twenty-first century's best films, while Mica Levi's music, filled with cool sensuality and piercing to the bone, was included in the of top fifty soundtracks of all time, according to one of the world's leading music publications Pitchfork.

The screening is in English with Russian subtitles.