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Film: In My Skin (Dans ma peau)
Year: 2002
Director: Marina de Van
Writer: Marina de Van
Starring: Marina de Van, Laurent Lucas and Léa Drucker
Review:
This is a movie that I heard about through podcasts. Not one that I heard about regularly, but it has been covered by a couple so it went on a list of movies to check out. I selected this, knowing that it was directed by a woman. The deeper I investigated it, Marina de Van, also wrote and starred here. That made me think that when this was developed, she knew what she was setting out to do. I had a feeling that as I was settling in, that this was going to fall into the New French Extremity movement.
Synopsis: a woman grows increasingly fascinated with her body after suffering a disfiguring accident.
For this movie, as I said in my opening, we are following Eshter (de Van). She lives with Vincent (Laurent Lucas), who is her boyfriend. She is working and I get the idea that she is in marketing or something along these lines. Her best friend is Sandrine (Léa Drucker) who she also works with. They go to a party together. It seems this could be work related.
Esther decides while at this party to go outside and walk around the yard. There is junk in the back, which is like metal and things. She ends up taking a misstep and cuts her leg. She doesn’t think it is that deep and goes back inside. We then see that she continues with the night, dancing with a guy who is getting a bit forward. Sandrine wants to leave so they’re in line for the bathroom. Esther sneaks off, going upstairs to see if there is another one. That is when she realizes that she has a deep gash in her leg and it is bleeding everywhere. She tries to stop it and hides when she hears someone coming. It is Sandrine, looking for her and alerted her that the guy who owns the place noticed the blood. They thought they’d find someone dead. Sandrine doesn’t realize that this is from her friend.
The two of them then go to a bar. It is after this that Esther seeks out a doctor. He is shocked by what he finds. He can’t believe that she didn’t notice it when it happened. It is also odd to him that she took so long to get it treated. He is concerned with her nerves around the wound. Esther doesn’t want additional procedures to fix it. She just wants it cleaned and covered so it can heal. She seems fine with it scarring.
Like the synopsis said, this starts a change within her. We see her in the bathtub where she is pulling at her skin. There’s a moment at work where she sneaks off, removes her pants to stab metal into the wound and the leg around it. She tries to hold it together for an upcoming business deal, but we see that she could be descending into madness. She has an experience at a work dinner where she believes her left hand is no longer attached. We then see her as she stabs into it with a knife and fork. She reveals things to Vincent and Sandrine, who are concerned for her. She doesn’t want their help though, which complicates her life further. Work is affected as she disappears and the more that she harms herself, the more difficult it is to hide.
That is where I’ll leave my recap and introduction to the characters. Where I want to start is that this is an interesting little character study of Esther. I’m going to start with a positive and negative here. I love that this doesn’t waste any time getting into it. We see her with Vincent, then we get a brief look at her before going to this party where everything starts. I do have a negative here though. I wish that this would just give us slightly more of a baseline for Esther before she starts harming herself. I can infer that this is the first time she’s ever done this. This accident sparks that.
Now that I’ve set that up, let me delve a bit more into Esther. I should say here that this feels like it is borrowing heavily from Crash by David Cronenberg. Esther does something simple like gash her leg on metal and then this starts her spiral to harm herself more and more. This goes just deeper than that though. I do get the idea that she is dealing with depression. It seems to me like she is losing gripes on reality and uses the pain the ground her. She also cannot go too long without harming herself. I do think that we need a bit more here to connect all the dots. This seems to go more for the shock value of it. I will credit de Van here. She is great as our lead. I love seeing her as she loses control of herself as she does herself harm.
I’m going to shift gears and talk about the rest of the cast. What I like here is that they’re here for different things to push Esther as we go. Vincent and Sandrine want to help her. She doesn’t want their help though. Vincent and her live together. They’re also planning their future together. I do like seeing him get frustrated with her as she spirals. Lucas plays his role well. Drucker on the other hand is a good friend. She shuts out Esther though when she sees there’s nothing she can do. Dominique Reymond and Bernard Alane are good as two clients that are the dinner with her as well as her boss is there. That scene was tense. I thought that the acting here was good to push her to where she ends up. Sometimes despite their help.
All that I went to then go into would be filmmaking. The strongest part here are the effects. We can see at times that she isn’t hurting herself really. That is fine because what we saw made me cringe. I like the fact that this went practical with what they used. Something that helps is the framing and the cinematography. They simulate all this for the most part to look real enough. I credit them there to help preserve that. Other than that, I’d say that the soundtrack fit for what was needed.
In conclusion, this doesn’t have the deepest story and it doesn’t necessarily need it. We see that a fateful accident has messed with Esther and she descends into madness where she can’t stop harming herself. She even turns to self-cannibalism. De Van’s performance is great. The rest of the cast pushes her to where she ends up. I thought that this is well made from the effects to cinematography and framing. If I do have an issue though, this is a slow story wise since there isn’t much to it. This does make up for it with the shock value. Not one I’d recommend to everyone. If you like French Extreme films and can manage realistic effects, then give this a watch. Not one that I would watch regularly though.
My Rating: 7 out of 10