Mysterious Skin (2005)
Directed by Gregg Araki
A teenage hustler and a young man obsessed with alien abductions cross paths, together discovering a horrible, liberating truth.
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"Mysterious Skin" submits an interesting directorial challenge, requiring Araki ("The Doom Generation," "Smiley Face") to take reprehensible acts of exploitation and a swell of destructive confusion and find a position of cinematic inspection that doesn't inspire viewers to immediately lunge for the eject button.
Araki (The Living End, The Doom Generation) could have gone the usual brutal, oppressive route but instead finds an astonishingly beautiful center to his film, focusing on tender moments of re-discovery and re-direction rather than on pain and defeat.
While Araki’s previous films, such as Totally Fucked Up and The Doom Generation, were self-consciously trashy tales of teen angst and chic nihilism, Mysterious Skin explores the difficult, painful and frequently sensationalised issue of child sexual abuse.
The director, Gregg Araki, until now best known for such transgressive gay-themed underground films as "The Doom Generation" and "Nowhere," has made the most mature movie of his career, one that deftly cuts not only between the stories of these wildly different young men, but also between past and present within those stories.
His previous films, such as The Doom Generation and Nowhere, were more concerned with shock value and surrealism than with plot and character and ended up sketchy and confusing as a result.
And yet, Araki, who made such thematically intense and sexually graphic films as "The Living End," "Totally F***ed Up" and "The Doom Generation," ratchets things even more acutely than those directors.
With this luridly beautiful film, Araki graduates into the company of such explorers as Todd Solondz ("Happiness") and Catherine Breillat ("Fat Girl").
Certains détails de la facture du film d’Araki ne sont pas non plus étrangers à la manière dont Todd Solondz souleva le cas de la pédophilie dans son foudroyant Happiness.
Actually, one doesn�t seem to be suffering much: Neil (Joseph Gordon-Levitt, resembling Timothy Hutton circa Ordinary People), who realized he was gay while watching his mother give a boyfriend a blow job, relishes the attention that Coach (Bill Sage) showers on him that fatal summer.
Since then, Araki stunk up the joint with Three's Company-meets-'30s screwball comedy Splendor, and there's a lot more stinking coming from the direction of Skin, a slow, see-through drama based on a novel by Scott Heim.
More troubling by half is veteran maverick Gregg Araki's Mysterious Skin, which feels like a regression from the lawless peak of The Doom Generation (and even the pop-smirk of Splendor) in that his trademark ironic nihilism this time poses as a brazenly inappropriate reference to Psycho for giggles in a situation that calls for shits.
Gay-themed filmmaker, Gregg Araki, after a five-year hiatus following his 1999 film, “Splendor,” comes back to the big screen with his tale about two teenagers, sexually molested by their Little League baseball coach when just 8-years old.
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That is, until Araki finished his apocalyptic trilogy of Totally Fucked Up, The Doom Generation and Nowhere.
The director, Gregg Araki, until now best known for such transgressive gay-themed underground films as "The Doom Generation" and "Nowhere," has made the most mature movie of his career, one that deftly cuts not only between the stories of these wildly different young men, but also between past and present within those stories.
His previous films, such as The Doom Generation and Nowhere, were more concerned with shock value and surrealism than with plot and character and ended up sketchy and confusing as a result.
Much of Araki's filmography, including such extreme works as The Doom Generation and Nowhere, deals with the cruelties of youth, those formative incidents of sexuality and/or violence that permanently scar an impressionable teenager.
Independent filmmaker Gregg Araki ("Totally F***ed up"/"The Doom Generation"/"Nowhere") uses Scott Heim's 1995 novel to tell a sobering, mature and disturbing tale about two young men and the homosexual abuse they suffered as children.
Hack exploitation filmmakers like Todd Solondz ("Palindromes") or Larry Clark ("Kids") will quake in their boots at Gregg Araki’s innovative cinematic rendering of a troubling story about the different trajectory of two boys molested by their Little League baseball coach (Bill Sage) in Hutchinson, Kansas.
With this luridly beautiful film, Araki graduates into the company of such explorers as Todd Solondz ("Happiness") and Catherine Breillat ("Fat Girl").
As Brian's mother, Elisabeth Shue stumbles about in the post "Leaving Las Vegas" hangover that has paralyzed her once promising career.
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Mysterious Skin makes Midnight Cowboy look tame in comparison.
Beginning as an ape on flashback nostalgia flicks along the lines of A Christmas Story, it proceeds with a wry equation of molestation with alien abduction--Todd Solondz territory without Solondz's measure of outrage and essential human tenderness.