"I hate it when they look like Tarzan and sound like Jane" (Mysterious Skin (DVD))

Member Name: thedevilinme

Product:	Mysterious Skin (DVD)
Date:	11/10/07 (76 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Dark and hard to watch cinema

Disadvantages: Ugly topics

Mixing pedophilia and homosexuality is always going to raise some heckles, especially in a Hollywood movie, as this film dares to do and have no qualms about it. Provocative is not the word. In general this type of sex offender is attracted to kids rather than a certain sexuality and so the link is very taboo to make. But Director Greg Araki and writer Scott Heim wants to make that connection, but in an intelligent and non offensive way, all the gay men having mustaches in keeping with his black humor approach to the matter and one of the boys molested in the film actually quite enjoying it. I have seen some risk taking acting and directing before but this is on another level. Although to be fair it’s never made clear whether the abuser in the film is gay or not an ambiguity to the film that makes it work on more than one level.

-The plot-

Its 1981 and two 8 year old boys are playing Little League baseball in small town America as the crickets chirp and the moths and bugs swirl around the halogen floodlights, one kid enjoying it, one not. Geeky Brian Lackey (George Webster) is the worse player in the team, only in the team so mum (Elizabeth Shue) can do some man hunting, whilst confident Neil (Chase Ellison) is the star player, a twinkle in his gay coach’s eye, Neil quite enjoying that attraction but he doesn’t know why.
We soon learn Neil knows he’s gay at such a young age and quite happy to be lured back to coach’s (Bill Sage) house for sweeties and playtime to stare into his big blue eyes. But the coach likes other young boys in the team, also, using the more than willing Neil to lure them back to the house after practice for abuse.

We then flash forward to 1987 and so traumatic is the event from that night Brian has subconsciously blacked out those missing five hours and his involvement in the possible abuse, nosebleeds and fits whenever he thinks about it, the only theory he is prepared to accept that he might have been abducted by aliens, an interesting metaphor to say the least if you think that 5 million Americans have claimed to have been taken by little grey men since the 60s.

Both boys have reacted very differently to their childhood memories, neither seeing each other since that night. Grown up Neil (Joseph Gordon Levitt) is liberated by his abusive childhood and now a well adjusted young man plying his trade as a rent boy, raking it in by offering his services to visiting businessmen and locals. Brian (Brady Corbett), on the other hand, is still a bespectacled shy kid, determined to unravel the mystery of those missing hours that have shaped his life, still stuck on the UFO theory, especially after an apparent visitation by a saucer on his parents roof, (why is it only Americans can climb on their roofs?) all the evidence he needs that the mystery is solvable.

With specter of A.I.D.s coming into the narrative through Neil’s increasingly reckless behavior as the film flips to present day 1991, the two boys are going in very different directions, Neil heading to the more sophisticated New York gay scene, hooking up with childhood friend Debi (Rachael Kraft) in her Soho apartment who witness some of the events back then. But if the two can meet for the first time, some ten years after that day, then maybe Neil can get some answers from Brian.

-Any good-

Mixing the obvious promiscuity and rampant drug taking of the gay scene and pedophilia makes for an intriguing if hard to watch movie. To see real child actors involved in this depravity is tough viewing, at times too much. But it those scenes are relevant to the films dynamic and in all truth not too exploitative when the sex scenes were required. The last thing you want as a director of a risky film like this is for some of the more unscrupulous renters to get off on it.

Completely non-exploitative in handling those tricky themes, Araki uses subjective camera points of view, tight facial close-ups and clever editing to merely suggest the things we don’t want to think about in life but practiced by these guys.
There is an interesting subtext to this that maybe some pedophilia is not one-sided, the act itself liberating to those with confused sexuality. There’s a case in the U.K news right now where a senior female tennis coach was up in court for the ‘allegedly’ abuse of a 13-year-old female protégé, who by the evidence so far seemed to quite enjoy the experience and it was anything but pedophilia, but society demanding it is through the courts as they feel uncomfortable with societies darkest and obvious desires.

From what I understand the gay scene can be a very seedy scene and pretty much goes for some people. With A.I.D.S once again on the increase in the gay community across the world it seems the new cocktail of drugs that give most of that death sentence back has taken away some of the risk. But Mysterious skin (great title for a movie) is about the eighties when the so called ‘gay plague’ was just kicking in, which makes the thought of child rape even more disgusting, and for that reason alone none of the gay characters are allowed to be likeable in this screenplay.

Joseph Gordon-Levitt (the spit of Heath Ledger) is a great talent and brave to take on such a role early in his career. The guy who played the coach must be still laying low. This is a brave movie in many ways and one that should be made, although it is fair to say it has a high and deliberate shock value to make you turn your head. I don’t think cinema should hide any of life’s dark secrets though. But this isn’t for those easily offended-not by along shot. I squirmed watching some scenes and felt sick about others. But these people are out there and its movies like this that gets under their skin. Their mysterious skin. Is it playing the controversial card? Well probably. But isn’t that what cinema does to get you watching?

Summary: Shock cine`