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Gone with the skin Skin Deep examines fluid sexuality by ANNIE ILKOW
Canadian director Midi Onodera's debut feature Skin Deep opens with a powerful, visually seductive credit sequence of body parts being slowly and beautifully tattooed. Unfortunately it's a promise of sensuality this modestly shot film cannot deliver. Co-written by Onodera and Barbara O'Kelly, the story revolves around a film director, Alex (Natsuko Ohama), researching and writing a film about tattoos, pain and sexuality. She places an ad in a tattoo magazine looking for people with interesting experiences and gets more than she bargained for when young, transgendered Chris (Keram Malicki-Sanchez) responds and is hired on the film. Poaching Chris' tattoo stories for her script, Alex obsesses about her project, becoming increasingly mercenary with those around her, including her lover/assistant Montana (Melanie Nicholls King). Alex's lesbian, gay and transgendered milieu, refreshingly portrayed as matter-of-fact and positive, proves too much for the repressed Chris, whose fatal attraction to Alex spirals out of control. The portrayal of the transgendered character as a psychotic stalker could leave Onodera open to criticism from a gay and lesbian community tired of being depicted as sick by mainstream film. Not so, says Onodera, who based the character on an actual case 15 years ago of a woman in Toronto who, while masquerading as a young man, killed someone. "I got to thinking about the clinical reports that came back that said she was a confused lesbian and so I began to wonder about the notion of sexuality and gender confusion. That's how the film got started. The funny thing [about the potential criticism] is that a lot of my research was done in San Francisco where there is quite an active female-to-male transsexual and transgender organization. They followed the progress of the film and they were extremely pleased." Onodera points out that Chris's violence is ultimately directed only toward herself, but admits that "I'm sure people will find ways to criticize the film in terms of all the political agendas and identities and that is certainly a problem... when people in an audience think that they're seeing something from their own community they want to see positive image reinforcement rather than criticism or negative imagery or a deeper look at it. But there are a growing number of [other] films that give that positive balance." With a number of excellent documentaries on the subject of transgendered people paving the way, and with Canadian film's growing rep for exploring "marginal" desire, Onodera's ideas will reach a wider audience but, unfortunately their impact is undermined. The main culprit is the script: the clumsy, clichéd dialogue that keeps the characters at a distance while the workaday shooting style suggests TV realism. The actors work hard but scenes consistently clunk. Despite an intriguing concept, the film is just not put together well enough to do more than parade the issues. Skin Deep opens this Friday, Aug. 1. See film listings for showtimes |
With Canadian film licking the envelope of sexual daring these days (as Exotica, Crash and Kissed make prudes of the film world) a filmmaker has to be brave to attempt the psycho-sexual eroto-Canadian genre.