Monday 13 February 2006
The Reflecting Skin (1990)
What a very strange film from the same stable as the equally weird "Passion of Darkly Noon". It was the debut feature of writer-director Philip Ridley who is possibly better known as an artist. A British production, it was filmed in Canada but set in the stark cornfields of the US mid-west in the 50's, and starred Viggo Mortensen in an early role and Lindsay Duncan as an intense and scary widow. However the real star of the picture is the youngster who plays Viggo's 12-year old brother through whose eyes the action unfolds. The movie is a hymn to death and deals with the fears and fantasies of the young. The lad is convinced that Lindsay is a vampire and feels obliged to save his brother from her; Viggo is in fact getting weaker and paler but probably through radiation poisoning from working at A-bomb test sites. All of the boy's friends have been abducted and sodomised for which his father is blamed (which he deals with by setting himself alight). No happy ending can follow and none does. This is certainly not a film for everyone, but it is a very effective and moving experience for those who can take it.
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And what a mystery too - you have only a slight grip on what's going on - I found it easy to get lost into the rich deep colours and the smells and sounds. Oil, the golden corn, and the dust of the 'vampire's' house. It was one of my first enlightenments into the power of film back then, and I saw it over and over, not believing how someone can make a film as good as you can think it in your head. Pain, suffering from the past, longing, desire, the realisation that the youngster has at the end...... it was a jolt of lightening at 16 and made such sense.
And I loved the way it didn't have a happy ending. Again, it just made it more realistic, a tragedy you could say. Mmm, maybe that's why he's the only survivor at the end of it. He watches, assesses, but always is on the outside looking in. Again, that only made it more real at the time.....
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