UNDER THE SKIN
Reviewed by Harvey Karten, Ph.D. Arrow Releasing Director: Carine Adler Writer: Carine Adler Cast: Samantha Morton, Claire Rushbrook, Rita Tushingham, Mark Womack, Matthew Delamere, Christine Tremarco, Stuart Townsend
"Under the Skin" is more likely than not to get under yours. The low-budget indie is by Carine Adler, known for TV scripts for Britain's Channel Four and for the movie "Fever" starring Katrin Cartlidge. The picture features a thoroughly professional use of hand-held camera with frequent jump shots, sudden lunges, contrasting imagery of bright and clear city with dank, dissolute back alleys, an understated sound track of disco and classical music, and best of all a radiant performance by the nineteen-year-old Samantha Morton in a challenging role.
Writer-director Adler forgoes the complexities of plot in favor of a psychological study, but does not forget to throw in ample suspense, unpredictability, and the ambiance of the English city of Liverpool where it was shot. Ms. Morton inhabits the role of Iris, who resents the preference of her mother (Rita Tushingham) for sister Rose (Claire Rushbrook) and, being relatively ignored at home, she is lonely and hungry for conversation from the men whom she meets. When her mom dies and is cremated mere weeks after being diagnosed with an aggressive brain tumor, Iris seems unable to grieve, a process which scripter Adler obviously believes is important before a survivor can get on with her life. Her incapacity to feel sorrow leads her to nurse a steadily rising repressed anger, which she takes out mostly via a series of desperate sexual encounters--much to the regret of her pregnant, stable, middle-class sister and her sister's reliable husband, Frank (Mark Womack).
The picture falters only when Adler recalls the mother in a brief episode of magic realism, but the director more than compensates for showing off Ms. Morton in a riveting performance. Her melancholy is so visceral that she may well tempt the movie audience to call out with the most understandable advice--that she stop her promiscuous behavior and simply sit in her room until she can make her peace with her anguish. Such counsel, however, would deprive us of surveying her episodes with a variety of men, from her fairly boring boyfriend Gary (Matthew Delamere) who would rather study than talk to her to the handsomest, Tom (Stuart Townsend), who easily dispatches her to the ecstasy she seeks, to one particular sleazeball who humiliates her after repeating the words that should alert anyone in her right mind, "Trust me."
Doubtless it was Morton's performance that allowed this movie to devour the competition from eighteen others at the Edinburgh festival where it won the Michael Powell Award for Best British Feature though it cost a mere one million dollars. The film is delightfully freighted with heavy sensuality, some deadpan comedy, and a character whose loneliness should strike a chord in all of us--as none in the audience is likely to be a complete stranger to its anguish. Not Rated. Running time: 85 minutes. (C) Harvey Karten 1998
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