Mysterious Skin

I rarely rave about films. In fact, I have made more than one enemy expressing (inflicting?) my opinions about lack of political depth, sheer stupidity or just good-ol' bad acting in many of today's films. So I was almost surprised when tonight, after watching Gregg Araki's Mysterious Skin, I felt the sudden urge to come straight home and scrap Brokeback Mountain from my top-20 list of favourite films, replacing it with this quietly beautiful masterpiece as possibly my favourite gay film ever (well... except All About My Mother... oh, and The Thin Red Line is quite gay too... whatever...).

I had been thinking about watching it ever since being mesmerized by Brick with my dear friend Le Duc and reading his made-to-impress review about it on his blog. But I wasn't prepared for Joseph Gordon-Levitt stunning performance as Neil, a dry and hungry rent-boy craving self-destruction, which was a far cry - in retrospect - from the stylised character of Brendan in Brick. Equally captivating the performances of Brady Corbet (Brian), and especially of Elizabeth Shue, of Leaving Las Vegas memory, as Neil's mother.


The film is beautifully narrated, and its story is not one easy to say. This becomes clear from one of the very first scenes, when a traumatised 9 year-old Brian wakes with a bleeding nose in the darkness of his house's basement without recalling what happened to him in the previous 5 hours. The rest of the movie is a relentless unfolding of events that will eventually lead Neil and Brian to remember, 10 years later, what had happened during those hours that had long been buried inside their minds.

This is not the first film to talk about pedophilia. In fact, there have been several attempts over the last few years, two of which stand out for their outstanding - if somewhat opposing - achievements: Todd Solondz's Happiness (in which I was first made aware of the unsettling bravura of Philip Seymour Hoffman) and Clint Eastwood's Mystic River. But, for all their undoubted excellence, both films seemed too eager to take a stand on the subject, the former through its uncompromising refusal to pass judgement, the latter through its unquestionable drawing of moral boundaries.

So it was with a certain relief when I realised that Myserious Skin wasn't really about pedophilia, but rather about the lives of those that had been scarred by it. A subtle difference, perhaps, but one that is important, because when talking about pedophilia it is all too easy to fall into the obvious, the pathetical or the prescriptive. Mysterious Skin avoids all these traps
and delivers one of the deepest, most impressive canvases on the subject.

So my final thought goes to UFOs and flying saucers, which play an important role in the film, and which for some reason I was looking into this afternoon while preparing a presentation on social contructivism (sic!). I found this site with an extraordinary picture collection of UFO depictions found in ancient artefacts - vases, carvings, figurines, frescos, paintings, tapestries, you name it - from Pre-History to Renaissance Europe. And started wondering if they're keeping something from us...