Esther is a young woman to whom, apparently, life smiles. Indeed, to her physical attractiveness she can combine undoubted professional skills, a blossoming engagement with Vincent, and a good relationship with Sandrine, her colleague and friend. A life of everyday office life and small social rituals, during one of which she injures her leg by tripping over tools in the garden.
The texture of the wound comes to light only a few hours later, marking a radical change in Esther's life. Inexplicably, the young woman refuses to be treated and to undergo a transplant that would restore the aesthetics of her figure, lingering on that wound again and again. Touching it, reopening it, making it bleed as if something morbid and manic has awakened in her. Esther begins to mentally absent herself from her work activity, an activity in which she has obtained a promotion generating also envy and a cooling of relations with Sandrine. She is as if enraptured by another reality having as its unit her body, her skin. It is with it and on it that the girl expresses herself, beginning to wound herself in various places by tasting the blood leaking from each cut. Her isolation is increasingly inexorable, to the point that her only action becomes the self-harming act that takes her, as the title says, inside herself, inside her skin.
A decidedly peculiar case this film, directed and starring Marina De Van. A stylistically sober and composed self-destructive soliloquy in which the viewer is treated as a passive voyeur, left voluntarily unaware. Indeed, there is no explanation of what happens in Esther's head at the sight of the blood of the first wound. There is no clarifying flashback to any trauma suffered or pain awakened. We simply witness the voluptuous undoing of a body at the hands of its rightful owner, who involves us in a kind of sadomasochistic relationship in which we are only entitled to watch without asking for explanations.
The film is thus tinged with darkness and mystery, the 'unspoken' comes to be swept away by the one dominant motif, the estrangement from the 'other' and the retreat into 'oneself,' into one's own flesh as the only reality of contact. For the explanation of this matter possible psychoanalytic readings could be wasted, and indeed are wasted, elsewhere. But this is not the point around which to revolve interest in 'Dans ma peau'. The film should be taken not as a 'cue to find a solution,' being rather the full and total realization of an impulse. Whether then it is an erotic, fetishistic and/or self-destructive impulse this does not matter during the viewing because the director and the protagonist do not seek our consent, our participation, instead making us uncomfortable. A discomfort generated by witnessing pain pursued, sought and inflicted in an almost ritual solitude, in an intimacy - that of the wounded woman with her wounded body - in which 'we' discover prying eyes.
Notes:
The film was broadcast on Fuori Orario with Italian subtitles.
Review by venus in furs
