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