Film review

  • The Man Who Sold His Skin

    Old YorkerFilm review

    ar-rajul allaḏī bāʿa ẓahrihu

    Kaouther Ben Hania (2020)

    Around fifteen years ago, a Swiss man called Tim Steiner agreed to be a human canvas for a new work by the Belgian controversialist artist Wim Delvoye.  The work, a tattoo that covers Steiner’s back, is described in a 2017 article on the BBC news website as ‘a Madonna crowned by a Mexican-style skull, with yellow rays emanating from her halo. … There are swooping swallows, red and blue roses, … at the base of Steiner’s back two Chinese-style koi fish, ridden by children, can be seen swimming past lotus flowers’.   The terms of Steiner’s contract stipulate that he sit topless in art galleries for a minimum of three shows annually.  The tattoo was still a work in progress when Steiner was first exhibited, in Zurich in 2006.  Since then, he’s appeared at various European venues, including the Louvre, as well as in China and Australia.  Delvoye’s work was sold in 2008 to Rik Reinking, a German art collector for 150,000 euros, of which Steiner received one third.  Reinking is thereby the contractual owner of part of Steiner.  When the latter dies, his back will be skinned and the skin framed permanently in Reinking’s collection.

    When he entered into this extraordinary agreement, Tim Steiner was the manager of a tattoo parlour and driven largely by a desire to help change perceptions of tattoo work.  ‘It’s the ultimate art form in my eyes,’ he told the BBC, ‘Tattooers are incredible artists who’ve never really been accepted in the contemporary art world’.  The protagonist and title character of The Man Who Sold His Skin, whose story is inspired by Tim Steiner’s, strikes a similar deal but from very different motives.  Soon after the start of the Syrian Civil War in 2011, Sam Ali (Yahya Mahayni) and his girlfriend Abeer (Dea Liane) are separated.  Sam flees the country for Lebanon;  in his absence, Abeer’s family arranges for her to marry what they consider a more suitable man – Ziad (Saad Lostan), a diplomat.  He’s posted to the Syrian embassy in Brussels, where Abeer finds work as a translator.  Sam is desperate to win her back but has neither the funds nor the paperwork to enter Belgium.  In Beirut, a chance meeting with Jeffrey Godefroi (Koen de Bouw), an internationally high-profile Belgian artist, gives Sam the chance to go to and get into Europe.  In exchange, Godefroi, who is pleased to describe himself as Mephistophelean, wants from Sam ‘not your soul but your back’.

    In other words, the Tunisian writer-director Kaouther Ben Hania uses the Steiner-Delvoye compact to create a fusion of migrant-crisis critique and art-market satire, and a synergy between the two.  The tattoo on Sam Ali’s back, nothing like the one on Tim Steiner’s, takes the form of a Schengen Visa.  It’s visual confirmation of a person becoming a sale-room commodity as a means to political asylum and personal security.  A powerful image and idea but how will they work as drama?  Ben Hania’s compelling set-up brought to mind Nadine Labaki’s Capernaum (2018), in which a Lebanese street kid sues his parents for bringing him into the world.  (The two films also have in common the same excellent cinematographer, Christopher Aoun.)  Labaki’s concept was essentially symbolic.  She either couldn’t or chose not to translate it into dramatic reality:  the courtroom scenes, with the boy’s parents in the dock, didn’t result in a verdict.  The Man Who Sold His Skin is more successful in realising its chief themes.  The true story behind it must have helped Ben Hania shape the screenplay but she still had plenty of inventing to do.  The narrative isn’t wholly satisfying but it’s always absorbing.  It leads to a finale which, while not believable as hard fact, is emotionally persuasive – and relieving.

    Sam incurs the Assad regime’s displeasure by proposing marriage to Abeer in hyperbolic language.  ‘Let’s start a revolution of love!’ he calls out on a busy train, one of whose passengers reports him to the authorities.  After being held in custody, he’s allowed to escape and is smuggled by his sister (Nadjoua Zouhair) in the boot of her car out of their home city of Raqqa and into Lebanon.  He spends a year doing menial, poorly paid jobs in Beirut.  It’s while he’s at an art gallery, stealing food from a buffet laid on for the opening of an exhibition, that he first encounters Godefroi – and takes up his offer:  Sam is prepared to do almost anything to be reunited with Abeer in Belgium, even though he knows she’s now married.  He’s obviously deemed not good enough by Abeer’s family, particularly her money-and-status-conscious mother (Raoudha Baccouche), but it’s not made clear what his work in Syria was, or how he and Abeer got together.  Sam has no problem holding up his end of a conversation with Godefroi on Faustian matters – and in English (like much of the dialogue – there’s some Arabic and French, too).  Ben Hania, in order to stress how desperately exploitable her hero is, evades the matter of his agency for much of the film.

    Godefroi’s project is viable because ‘it’s easier to move goods internationally than to move people’.  You accept the force of this striking statement although The Man Who Sold His Skin may still leave you wondering how exactly the process works in Sam’s case.  It emerges eventually that he has been given a temporary Belgian visa but how did he obtain it – as a human being, as distinct from an objet d’art emblazoned with a Schengen Visa?  Sam is being handled by well-connected people in the megabucks international art market:  are we meant just to take it as read that money talks?  And once Sam is in Brussels – on display at one of the city’s Royal Museums of Fine Arts by day, holed up miserably in a luxury hotel outside working hours – Ben Hania sometimes sacrifices credibility for the sake of immediate impact.

    A sequence at the museum where Sam’s on show, and its aftermath, are especially shaky.  He tells Abeer in one of their online meetings that he’s employed in Brussels as assistant to an artist, without revealing the true nature of this work.  Abeer and Ziad happen to visit the gallery exhibiting Sam just as protesters against the exploitation of Syrian refugees are demonstrating there.  The gallery’s security consists of a lone man in a suit; in an earlier scene, he forbids Sam to speak to a group of kids on a school trip but he’s helpless to prevent either the demonstration or Ziad, after argy-bargy with Sam, from venting his anger on another art work, one less able to fight back.  Ziad’s startlingly undiplomatic behaviour has similarly improbable consequences:  Abeer asks Sam to use his influence to dissuade the museum from pressing charges against her husband; Sam is reasonably astonished by the request but he has a word with people in Godefroi’s team that seems to do the trick.  Although Ziad, in causing wilful damage to a valuable painting, presumably broke the law (in the presence of many witnesses), there’s no suggestion of police interest in what he’s done.  Sam has been attracting media attention but there’s no evidence either of press or television coverage of the fracas in the museum, which would surely lose Ziad his job.

    Yet Ben Hania illustrates the ironies of the hero’s situation succinctly and effectively.  His servitude in Western Europe may be soul-destroying but at least Sam is relatively safe there:  he discovers in a distressing FaceTime with his mother (Darina Al Joundi) that she can no longer walk, the result of injuries sustained in a bomb attack in Raqqa.  Later on, when Sam’s actions lead to his arrest in Brussels, he breathes more easily behind bars than he ever seemed to do in his five-star hotel room.  Ben Hania’s satirical blows often land on target – as when, to Godefroi’s consternation, a large pimple develops on Sam’s back.  The offending, devaluing object has to be removed surgically:  the close-up popping of the pimple is gruesome watching.  During Sam’s absence from the gallery, a notice of apology explains that ‘this work is being restored’.

    What happens in the film’s climax is increasingly extraordinary but a combination of rapid plot twists and emotional momentum makes all this easier to accept than the smaller-scale implausibility of Ziad’s eruption in the museum and surrounding events.  At a plush auction house, Sam sits on stage, a lot for sale.  On completion of the bidding, he goes berserk, runs yelling from the stage into the aisle between the rows of seats and takes out of his trousers what may be a detonator.  The terrified assembly heads for the exits:  it’s a mark of how strongly Ben Hania has built up antipathy to the forces confronting Sam that, while you wouldn’t want to see them blown up by a suicide bomber, it’s pleasing to witness their humiliating, well-heeled panic.  Now things start to work in Sam’s favour.  Claiming to speak only his mother tongue, he’s interviewed in a jail cell with the help of a translator who turns out to be Abeer:  the francophone official with them is oblivious to her informing the prisoner that she has left her husband.  When he appears in court, Sam is cleared of any law-breaking beyond remaining in Belgium beyond his visa’s expiry date.  He’s promptly returned to Syria – and a kind of liberty.

    By this stage, the shrewdly subversive Jeffrey Godefroi is on Sam’s side.  It must be Godefroi who’s responsible for the standout legerdemain in the closing stages of The Man Who Sold His Skin.  Shortly after Sam’s repatriation, a video appears online that shows him being executed.  It’s a fake:  in the final sequence, Sam is revealed to be alive and well, and living with Abeer and his pet cat, which hasn’t been seen since the film’s opening scene, when Sam was woken in the night and arrested, thanks to his intemperate marriage proposal.  The household appears to be living a sequestered life but Sam, in a video call with Godefroi, describes himself as a free man who ‘was always a free man’.  It’s anyone’s guess at what stage Godefroi starts to help rather than commodify the protagonist, or how secure or otherwise Sam really is in his new habitat.  But Kaouther Ben Hania, against huge odds, contrives to deliver something approaching a feelgood ending.

    The Man Who Sold His Skin was nominated for Best International Film at this year’s Oscars.  It’s one more addition to the list of films that would have deserved the award than the actual winner, Another Round.  That list includes, as well as fellow nominees Collective and Quo Vadis, Aida?, Dear Comrades! (which only made the ‘short list’ of fifteen), Charlatan (which didn’t even make that) and Minari (ineligible for consideration, even though most of the dialogue is Korean).  I expect the list will lengthen further as I get round to more of the other possibilities.  (Any regular readers of these notes will know that Another Round is a persisting bee in my bonnet.)

    Yahya Mahayni gives a fine performance in the lead role.  He creates a character that is thoroughly convincing even when the events involving Sam are not.  Mahayni isn’t tall, which helps reinforce the little-guy-up-against-it dimension of the story; he’s also muscular and strong-jawed, which is right for Sam’s resilience.  Most of the supporting performances aren’t so satisfying.  While it’s never hard to believe that Sam is besotted with the beautiful Abeer, Dea Liane doesn’t do enough (or Ben Hania doesn’t give her the material needed) to suggest that Abeer is equally committed to Sam.  Saad Lostan is excessively dislikeable in the admittedly thankless role of Ziad.  The playing of the best-known European actors – Koen de Bouw as Godefroi and Monica Bellucci as his gallerist – is a bit too deliberate.  Ben Hania has de Bouw wear black eyeliner to stress Godefroi’s diabolical aspect:  since the actor already has dark eyes that magnetise the camera, the effect is too much.  This isn’t a criticism that can be levelled, however, at Wim Delvoye, whose work inspired the film and who makes a cameo appearance as an insurance man.  His face is almost fascinatingly nondescript.   There’s a matching soullessness in Delvoye’s voice as his character summarises what kind of death Sam Ali will need to die in order for his owners’ insurance policy to pay out.

    4 September 2021

  • The Nest

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Sean Durkin (2020)

    Sean Durkin’s second cinema film arrives nearly a decade after his first, Martha Marcy May Marlene.  In the meantime, he’s racked up several producing credits but only one for directing – the 2013 British television mini-series Southcliffe.  That was scripted by Tony Grisoni but, as with his debut feature, Durkin has the sole writing credit on The Nest.  The film’s first half is promising, the second increasingly disappointing – and surprising only in its failure to surprise.  The main character, Rory O’Hara (Jude Law), is a trader in the financial markets – an Englishman abroad at the start of the story.  He works in New York, where he lives with his American wife Allison (Carrie Coon), their pre-adolescent son Ben (Charlie Shotwell) and Sam (Oona Roche), Allison’s older daughter from a previous relationship.  Rory suddenly announces to Allison he’s gone as far as he can on Wall Street.   It’s the mid-1980s and the deregulation of British financial markets is kicking in.  He reckons the other side of the pond is now the place to make a bigger splash.  Selfishly ambitious Rory is asking for trouble.  He gets his comeuppance ad nauseam.

    Durkin sets things up effectively, though.  We don’t hear the phone conversation with his former boss in London but we see from Rory’s face that he’s keeping a secret from his family – a secret that his zippy bonhomie easily conceals from them.  When he plays soccer with Ben and one of his friends, Rory is a big kid who has to win but the boys enjoy themselves, too.  He travels to England ahead of Allison, Sam and Ben, and, proudly excited, welcomes them to the pile in the Surrey countryside that he’s bought as their new home.  He informs the children that the flooring dates from the 1700s and, if that’s not enough, that Led Zeppelin once stayed at the mansion.  Rory asks the car driver who’s conveyed the rest of the family there to take a photo of them all.  The driver obliges before it’s pointed out that Sam isn’t in the group.  A second photo, including her, is taken, at Rory’s request.  The moment, even so, is a neatly incisive indication of the relative importance to him of his son and his stepdaughter.  Soon after, we learn that Sam is attending a state school while Ben has been enrolled in a private one.

    Commodity broker Arthur Davis (Michael Culkin) welcomes back Rory with open arms.   He and his wife (Annabel Leventon) even host a posh soirée, at which Arthur describes Rory to the gathering as one of the most talented men he’s ever known.  In the course of this tribute, Arthur also mentions that Rory asked to rejoin his firm.  This is news to Allison, whose husband told her Arthur was begging Rory to come back on board.  He’s too drunk on hearing his praises sung to notice that Arthur has revealed his lie to Allison.  But this is a turning point in The Nest and hints at what proves to be the fundamental weakness of Durkin’s script.  It transpires that Rory’s transatlantic career had ground to a halt; back in London, he’s failing to seal any new deals and, at the same time, ostentatiously living beyond his means.  Durkin, in effect, equates the moral bankruptcy of Rory’s ambition with financial bankruptcy.  Since plenty of people with similar values did very well out of the Big Bang of 1986, it can’t credibly be suggested that the likes of Rory were doomed to fail.  Perhaps Durkin believes deregulation helped sow the seeds of the global financial crisis twenty years later but this isn’t the message he conveys because Rory goes broke immediately – whereas the relatively unassuming Steve (Adeel Akhtar), another of Arthur’s team and Rory’s former friend as well as colleague, goes from strength to strength.  The film focuses so much on Rory’s personal defects that he ceases to be a typical financial wheeler-dealer, and The Nest can’t succeed as a critique of brittle capitalism.

    By not allowing Rory to be any good at his job, Durkin makes it a puzzle as to why shrewd Arthur lauds his former protégé so extravagantly.  He’s also initially receptive to Rory’s proposal that Arthur sell his company to a more powerful American outfit looking for a London base:  Arthur agrees to talk to Rory’s contact in Chicago.  It’s a few days later, after the latter has been refusing to answer his calls, that Rory discovers Arthur didn’t like the terms offered and broke off discussions.  When Rory demands to know why Arthur didn’t tell him, the answer is that it was late on the previous Friday afternoon when Arthur pulled the plug.  It makes no sense that Rory, immoderately pleased with his big idea, has let the best part of another working week go by without checking with Arthur how talks are progressing (especially when Rory can’t get to speak to Chicago).

    It’s no more clear what Allison sees in her husband or what, apart from good sex and the cup of tea he brings to her bedside each morning, has kept their relationship going even in New York.  Allison enjoys her work there as a riding instructor and doesn’t want to uproot the family’s life.  She’s seemingly placated when Rory arranges for stables to be built in the vast grounds of their English home – until, that is, the builder’s men down tools because his bills aren’t getting paid.  Whereas his antipathy to Rory is unequivocal and limiting, Durkin’s treatment of his female protagonist is vague.  Although Carrie Coon’s emotional variety helps convert this to involving ambiguity, it’s ever harder to ignore the suspicion that Allison is difficult to pin down chiefly because her character is underwritten.  For example, the controlled feminist indignation she shows at the Davises’ party goes nowhere.

    Allison is also on the receiving end of more than her fair share of clumsy plotting.  It’s through a phone conversation with the builder that she finds out about the unpaid bills but, when her beloved horse Richmond collapses, she doesn’t think of phoning for a vet.  Instead, she fetches up at a local farm to seek help.  It’s not as if Allison knows the mansion’s telephone has been disconnected (another unpaid bill):  she learns that from Rory when he returns home later, and they have one of several stand-up rows.  The farmer, who pronounces Richmond beyond help and shoots him, is introduced also to allow Allison, in order to earn a few quid, to get labouring work with him.  She seems to find the work fulfilling but it’s hardly mentioned again – until she tells astounded fellow diners at a swanky London restaurant what her job is.  This dinner, with prospective business partners for Steve and Rory, is the first stage of a gruesome night that forms the climax to the story.  Allison is there because her husband wants to her to create a decorative good impression but the marital relationship is now in such a parlous state that it’s impossible to believe she’d  agree to help him out.  She doesn’t appear to accompany Rory with the intention of stymieing him – she speaks her mind only in infuriated reaction to his arrogant bullshit in the restaurant.

    In any case, Rory’s more than capable of stymieing himself single-handed:  the other men at the dinner decide they want a deal but with the proviso that it involves Steve only.  Durkin really won’t give Rory an inch.  After learning that the Chicago buyout is off, he decides to visit his mother (Anne Reid) in her London council flat.  He’s been estranged from her, and from his brother, for years – supposedly because his father, no longer around, was a violent abuser.  The mother knows nothing about Allison or the children, though it seems surprising that ultra-competitive Rory hasn’t wanted to keep boasting to her about how high he’s risen above his humble beginnings.  It’s even more surprising that he chooses the occasion of a big knockback at work for a reunion with his mother:  he can hardly be looking for sympathy from her and certainly doesn’t get it.  Jude Law is engaging at the start but his portrait, rather than leavening Durkin’s conception of the character, curdles into reinforcement of it.  Law pushes too hard to make Rory obnoxious.  He’d have done better to use some of the charm he gave Dickie Greenleaf in The Talented Mr Ripley.  At least we could then have seen Rory, even temporarily, as personally and professionally plausible.

    There’s good work in the smaller parts from Adeel Akhtar, Michael Culkin and Anne Reid, and Oona Roche and Charlie Shotwell are both effective.  The nature of Sam’s rebellion against her new life is a bit obvious – the evening that Rory and Allison are up in London, Sam lets the dodgy local teenagers she’s fallen in with take over the house; Allison returns early next morning to find the entrance paint-sprayed with abusive graffiti – but the tensions between mother and daughter are well played by Roche and Carrie Coon.  And Ben’s decline is one of the most striking elements of the whole piece:  a carefree kid in New York, he grows longer, thinner and more depressed in Surrey.  The mansion, however, is something of a letdown.  I wasn’t expecting – or wanting – a haunted house mystery.  I think I was expecting more sense of connection between the family’s new, singular environment and the dégringolade that nearly destroys them.  (Durkin made much more expressive use of the premises occupied by the cult in Martha Macy May Marlene).  Mátyás Erdély, who shot Son of Saul (2015), is the cinematographer and his lighting is impressive throughout.  Other aspects of the camerawork, though, become – like the film as a whole – progressively less interesting.  In the early stages, Sean Durkin creates an impression of the characters being watched though they don’t know it.  By the end of The Nest, the camera movement isn’t much more than hyperactive.

    2 September 2021

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