In My Skin (2002)

LUCIFER · **Posted:** Thu Aug 17, 2006 12:32 pm **Post subject:** In My Skin (2002)

Dans ma peau (2002) aka In my skin

IMDB INFO

TRAILER

Esther cuts her leg on some metal in the backyard while at a party. Afterwards she becomes fascinated with the wound and keeps cutting herself and reopening it. At the same time she receives a promotion in her PR job and she and her boyfriend Vincent buy a house and move in together. But her obsession with self-mutilation soon grows to the point that she starts cutting her own flesh with scissors and knives and devouring her own skin and blood.

Quote:

In My Skin comes from Marina de Van, an occasional French actress and writer of several of Francois Ozon's films, including the poem that supposedly inspired Criminal Lovers (1999) and the screenplays for Ozon's Under the Sand (2001) and 8 Women (2002).

In My Skin is a quite startling film about pathology and obsession. Comparisons have been made between In My Skin and the work of David Cronenberg. The film certainly evokes the same fetishistic sense of regarding the body as an alien object that Cronenberg does. One thinks of Cronenberg's The Fly (1986) with its protagonist fascinatingly watching the process of his body turning into an insectoid lifeform, and especially Crash (1996) with its fetishistic fascination with forms of bodily mutilation, namely auto accidents. Staying in Canada, one might make even further comparison between In My Skin and Lynne Stopkewich's Kissed (1996), which similarly was a woman-directed film wherein Molly Parker develops an unhealthy sexual obsession (with corpses) and becomes embroiled in her fetish to the abandonment of standard relationships.

The whole film is shot and lit in cool, neutral tones, the sort of tones that a sleek upmarket furniture commercial might come in. Amid these muted banalities come de Van's increasing obsessions with self-mutilation. There's the absolutely remarkable scene that takes place in a fashionable restaurant where de Van's co-workers go on about different PR practices in Japan, while de Van sits unnoticed having a mini-crisis - she has to first stop her left hand from playing in her food, it then becomes detached from her wrist and she sits there silently panicking before managing to screw it back on, and then sits pricking and twisting her skin with a fork, while all the while the banal conversation continues to go on around her. It's a scene that is in every way as remarkable as the chicken coming to life scene at the dinnertable in Eraserhead (1977). The bizarreness continues to build in subsequent scenes with de Van in a hotel room, cutting and mutilating her skin with a knife and then eating it, before lying back, raising her leg and letting blood from the wound flow down into her mouth; and the rather unnerving scene towards the end where she starts twisting a knife into her eye.

Films with sexually obsessive subject matter like this also invoke a relationship between the actor/actress and the director who uses them as their text - the work of Alfred Hitchcock, David Lynch, even Russ Meyer, offers good examples. The relationship is frequently akin to a dominant and a submissive, the actress like a submissive that the director is unleashing their urges and fantasies on. Here quite uniquely de Van is the director, writer and lead actress all in one and In My Skin presents the unique image of the director using her own body as the film's text. It seems less a filmic exploration of obsession than it does a piece of performance art.

You also have to admire the amazing degree of control that de Van exerts over what it is that she refuses to allow us to see of her own obsession. You could make even further comparisons, in quite different ways to the aforementioned, between In My Skin and Roman Polanski's Repulsion (1965). In both films we are shown a woman who descends into mentally unbalanced behaviour and obsession, yet where any handholds or easy clues as to the reason why are withheld from the audience. This is what makes In My Skin so effectively unnerving - de Van's insistence that we merely observe the behaviour her character displays, but never become party to it internally. Quite why de Van is so driven to mutilate herself is something de Van the writer never gives us. There's certainly no clues to be found in de Van's regal and aristocratically aloof features - she rarely even smiles. Indeed the final image of the film with she in black, lying on the bed in the hotel room, bloodied and bruised and looking at the camera as it pulls back from her, is she, both as director and actress, defying us to make any sense or pass judgment on her. The nearest we get to an explanation is one of contrasts. As director de Van spends much time on the detail of her character's life - the plans to move in with her boyfriend, her job and promotion - that the effect is clearly one of observing the disparity between a placid, banal and ordered surface and something twisted and obsessive inside. Perhaps de Van is saying that this kind of obsessiveness is something that lives beneath all calm surfaces.

ed2k: In.My.Skin.2002.DVDRip.XviD-iMBT.avi [699.71 Mb] [Stats]

SUBTITLES HERE

Avanze · **Posted:** Thu Aug 17, 2006 3:25 pm **Post subject:**

This film is really awesome. I have the French dvd already.

trep · **Posted:** Thu Aug 17, 2006 7:24 pm **Post subject:**

Watched long ago, bought the DVD. As Avanze said, it's awesome

grzEGOrz · **Posted:** Fri Aug 18, 2006 12:51 am **Post subject:**

disturbing stuff. maybe not coherent as a whole, but some really catchy images. worth checkin out!

ant_sunrise · **Posted:** Fri Aug 18, 2006 2:09 am **Post subject:**

oh wow. i saw the preview for this 2 years back then i forgot the name.

glad i just found this.
very nice.

vnorske · **Posted:** Fri Aug 18, 2006 10:27 am **Post subject:**

French cinema is amazing!

bipbop13 · **Posted:** Sun Jun 10, 2007 6:32 am **Post subject:**

is there a dubbed version of this, or hardcoded subs......signed King Lazy Viewer :wacky:

Avanze · **Posted:** Sun Jun 10, 2007 12:21 pm **Post subject:**

bipbop13 wrote:

is there a dubbed version of this, or hardcoded subs......signed King Lazy Viewer

Probably not, but do not let that stop you from watching this most disturbing film.

wicker man · **Posted:** Sun Jun 10, 2007 1:46 pm **Post subject:**

gonna click the dl link when I get home, thanks

In My Skin (2002)

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