New in Theaters: Mysterious Skin

 Karina saw and reviewed Mysterious Skin at the Tribeca Film Festival. This is her original review, with a couple of minor tweaks. The film opens today in Manhattan and will move to other cities in the coming weeks.

With his sixth feature, Mysterious Skin, Gregg Araki has lept out of underground semi-obscurity and towards the forefront of American indie cinema. A deeply affecting adaptation of Scott Heim's 1995 novel, Skin is the perfect "comeback" project for the filmmaker: it allows him to show off his brilliant sense of design and expert handling of acid-tinged humor within the confines of a solid structure and fully-realised characters. In other words, the stuff he's not always so great at has already been laid out for him by someone else, giving him room to play. The result is a kind of emo-epic, a psychologically complex, morally difficult, and ultimately heartbreaking work that works on an extraordinary scale of emotionality.

 
Skin tracks two boys, Neil (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) and Bryan (Brady Corbet), who at the age of eight experience a common incident of sexual abuse. Over the course of ten years, their lives take different, seperate courses, as they struggle to sort out the truth of what happened to them. Araki introduces his protagonists by having each relate two intertwined formative memories. For Bryan, a vision of "waking up" with a bloody nose in his family' s cellar, with no memory of the previous afternoon, gets colluded with a suppossed sighting of a UFO. Neil conflates his first ejaculation with his first day of Little League - and his first glimpse of the man who we come to know as The Coach.

It becomes apparent to the audience that this coach is the man that abused them both, but for much of the film neither Bryan nor Neil can talk about what happened the summer they were eight in terms of "abuse." Bryan is convinced that he was abducted by aliens, and goes as far as to strike up a friendship with a woman he sees on TV who claims that she's been "taken", too. Neil, meanwhile, is certain that he and Coach were in love. By 15, he's started a career as a hustler, trying to recapture that feeling with any and every older man he comes across. By 18, he's exhausted every trick his small town has to offer. He transplants himself to New York, where things go impressively (if somewhat predictably) awry. Meanwhile, Bryan is slowly coming to the terrifying conclusion that aliens may not have robbed his innocence after all.

Dark stuff, to be sure, but it never feels gratuitously shocking. The world the film creates is so alive, even when Araki dips into his special brand of surrealism, that it threatens to dissolve the screen. This is a testament to the actors (especially Gordon-Levitt), who at no point feel unlike real people wading through really murky territory. Neil and Bryan start at two distant emotional extremes but organically come together; despite the wriggle-in-your-seat viscerality of certain images, the film's final setpiece works some kind of cathartic magic.


It's clear that, in the five years since he's released a film, Araki has gone through some hardcore emotional and creative maturation. But as I watched Mysterious Skin, I tried to figure out *exactly* what makes this film different from his previous work, and the answer didn't immediately pop out at me. I haven't seen The Living End or Totally Fu*ked Up in ten years, so let's leave those alone. It's easy to write off The Doom Generation or Nowhere as slumming-actor-friendly excursions into stylish subversion. Splendor, his last film, represented its own major growth spurt; Araki had not only dared to make a post-punk music-video reinvention of Jules et Jim, but he had the sheer audacity to give it a family-values-skewing happy ending. Ten years into his career, Araki had suddenly, somehow, become a humanist.

All of those pictures had a few things in common: a vivid, if at times didactic, sense of color; a just-editing-to-my-favorite-mix-cd feel of club-kid theatricality; a common investigation of  sameness through extreme difference; and, above all, a deep interest in and understanding of the private mysteries and performative nature of desire. Mysterious Skin has all that, and more importantly, it shows Araki melding those talents more seamlessly than ever before. What it doesn't have is the Brechtian distancing of his previous films: no one speaks directly to the camera, nobody video tapes anyone else; sets are designed to look less like art installations than actual locations. Surely this'll irk some Araki devotees; the rest of us will offer our congratulations. Stripped of such formal crutches, Araki's made a uniquely self-assured film, and it shines.