Spoilers:
I don't think I've witnessed such a culture shock moment in cinema since that scene in Unleashed/Danny The Dog in which Morgan Freeman and Jet Li wander around a Glaswegian Spar shop! (I'm going to go wild with my filmic free associating in a minute so I hope this first one prepares you!). Not that Scarlett Johansson isn't allowed and/or encouraged to prowl the streets of Glasgow at leisure if she wishes (and she's already encountered the local neds attacking her in her van, so she is prepared for that happening again!), but there is that strange way that a Hollywood interloper is clashing with the 'real world' (annoyingly if the film were set in Edinburgh I could have used the "Hollywood clashing with Holyrood" pun!) that aptly feels like two entirely separate worlds, and cultures, troublingly clashing together. Studying each other. Trying to figure each other out. Mutual communication or just a way of working out the best way to exploit the other party to fulfil their goal? Which almost always comes back to sex.
I really liked this film, especially in its beautiful layered imagery in which Johansson's face almost becomes part of the natural world, or gets surrounded by vibrant waves of human energy. It is an enigmatic film that puts quite a few other enigmatic films to shame in the sense that, in its vagueness, the film encompasses so many different subjects from the mundane to the comic to the cosmic that it seems to touch on all sorts of levels. Only Kiyoshi Kurosawa is similar, and this film could feel like some strange combinaton of the serial killing Cure, the forbidden and forbidding 'ghetto areas' of Pulse, the comedy of Doppleganger, and the abstracted enviromentalism of Charisma.
For example I love that this film is grounded in its contemporary Scottish setting. Johansson's use of a rather received pronounciation British accent, as well as amusingly getting around the issues of a thick Glaswegian accent by getting her to repeat her male companion's dialogue (thereby reinforcing the culture clash idea and I loved the idea that, while story-wise it ties into the mimicry idea, that a killer alien is the medium used by the filmmakers here in order to help the international audience understand the Scots accent!), itself implicitly raises a lot of questions about English versus Scottish even before the news report on the radio briefly mentions the referendum on devolution in the Scottish Parliament. Similarly I could see the right wing Daily Mail audience loving the implied vigilante idea in the early section of the film of a posh British woman doing her duty to protect the country by prowling the streets and braving nightclubs in order to interrogate people about where they came from, eventually leading to bashing unwary Czech immigrants over the head with rocks!
Part of the delicate nature of these scenes is that the alien has her own agenda but is unwittingly raising all of these class and social issues in the minds of the people she talks to (building to the scene of treating the disfigured gentleman without any ingrained societal prejudices). Maybe that dawning awareness is what leads to her change? Maybe the aliens were not aware of how from the moment they begin interacting with other human beings that they get folded into the society and subject to its pressures, whether they intend to be or understand those pressures, or not.
There's also that absolutely perfectly composed, very brief shot of the homeless person sitting on a sheet in front of a wall with a CCTV camera on it. You don't just have extraterrestrial aliens observing you. The point isn't laboured, but it's there.
This leads me to say that I found this a very funny film! While it is obviously all played deadly serious I loved that the man hunting early section of the film is really just a sci-fi embellished version of a
great Monty Python sketch! It even has a great slinky snake charmer musical score for those moments! (That amazing underwater scene certainly bears a debt to the work of Chris Cunningham, particularly
flex) Or the way that when one of the men makes a comment that there is something wrong with Johansson's eye that she immediately enters a lock up garage to get the once over from her motorcyclist companion, as if she needed a tune up! And of course during the scene of Johansson being led around a supermarket, I was pleased that the national beverage, Irn-Bru, turned up on the shelves in the background!
But back to the culture clash stuff. I'm as amused by Johansson herself being confronted by Tommy Cooper and Deacon Blue as much as I think it is beautifully appropriate that the alien herself is trying to make some kind of contact! This contact itself is enigmatic. Is the alien seduced by human culture? I'm not sure, as even in the second half of the film the alien shows much more affinity for nature itself than with human beings - with the swirling atmospheres of fog, wind, ice and snow, and especially with the tiny insects such as the ant found on the dead woman at the beginning of the film and the trapped fly in the window at the turning point moment of letting her last victim go.(Which I kind of think is the more important moment than simply the alien feeling an affinity with the disfigured man and retrieving him, as she had already led him to that point despite a more sensitive, or rather subtler, form of seduction prior to that). It also ties in with the woman who dies in a futile attempt to rescue her pet dog from the raging tide.
Is the alien awakened to the simple nature of existence on another planet? Is she just running away from or troubled by the callousness of her actions? I particularly like the second half of the film as the alien 'goes on the run', yet it appears to not be a serious attempt to run away but just a spur of the moment act of going off reservation. One that is doomed to failure less because of the motorcycling pursuers but in the way that her human facade isn't good enough to allow the alien to fully pretend to be a real human being.
While The Man Who Fell To Earth is often raised in discussions of this film, I think this final section in which the alien isn't physically able to assimilate by partaking in human pleasures is where Under The Skin significantly differs, as in The Man Who Fell To Earth Thomas Newton ends up 'fallen', corrupted by human vices and almost forcibly assimilated, having to renege on his previous identity to fit untroublingly into his newly allocated position in human society. Here our alien seems to want to enjoy the dream, as in the scene of exploring, or abandoning, herself in a bedroom mirror as a real woman (unlike Thomas Newton she is not going to shed her appliances to reveal her true nature to the human in the next room), and is trying to mentally adapt to human life and culture (by getting more 'socialised' - going from driver to passenger, from predator to prey, from dilapidated houses to actually entering currently in-use human habitats, from purely relating to others through sex to learning about other traits that human beings have) but is constantly being made aware of her fundamental physical otherness. There obviously wasn't any consideration by the creators of the body that there would be a need to eat or actually physically have sex, as it wouldn't have been essential to the core mission.
Which leads to that commune with nature and the rape finale in which the attacker (after a brief encounter earlier in which he uses almost the exact same dialogue as the alien had to her male victims earlier) removes too many layers in his eagerness. Though I have to say that the most shockingly violent moment for me wasn't that final one, it was the ripping open of the top layer of the duffel coat to expose the garishly pinkish-purple top underneath. Just the colour of that top (shown earlier in the film during the disrobing and beckoning sequences) is too intimate at that moment and in that sequence it shows in no uncertain terms that the enticer has had the tables turned and been violated. Is the violation a natural outcome of having a body that has been literally engineered for maximum sexual attrativeness in order drive men wild with animalistic lust? Which I guess is where a gender critique of the film comes in, in which the woman who might not yet know the power of her body and attractiveness has that power taken away from them by the men who try to possess her. Yet if she lets no one possess her, she is seen as cold, evil, potentially predatory and perhaps not even human.
For me, the rape sequence and its aftermath reminded me very strongly of the end of Catherine Breillat's Fat Girl then sequeing into the firey climax of Daft Punk's Electroma. Also the Breillat film in that final section features a number of sequences of threatening traffic, also present in Under The Skin. It was extremely moving (once the alien abdicated their responsibilty for feeding men into a processing plant, she suddenly became a touching character!) and in a way quite tragic as that tenuous moment of potential interspecies, even interstellar, communication and understanding goes up in smoke. Yet in that beautiful final shot (kind of the inverse of the opening of Prometheus!), perhaps the alien truly has mutated into an element that can now become a part of our world.