Gregg Araki
Mysterious Skin

It's not easy to tackle a delicate issue, especially on a social level, without resorting to philosophical frills, swirling and baroque descriptions of the deepest intimacy, easy moralism on decay, or concessions to melodrama. Although "Mysterious Skin" is not a revolutionary film, it certainly avoids getting bogged down in the aforementioned murky dangers. Gregg Araki, an American director of Japanese descent, in 2004 took up a novel by Scott Heim, worked on it until he crafted a good screenplay, shot, packaged, and presented "Mysterious Skin" at the 61st Venice Film Festival.

In a dusty Kansas of 1981, two children live through separate experiences that will mark them: the first is sexually abused by his baseball coach, while the second only faces advances from the same coach but is a victim of violence from his peers. As they grow up, Brian (Brady Corbet) and Neil (Joseph Gordon Levitt) process their trauma differently: the first believes he was abducted by aliens, the second discovers he is gay and decides to prostitute himself. This will have serious repercussions on their lives. Brian will be unable to face the harsh reality while Neil will end up being a victim of it.

When the film was released in theaters, the controversies were rampant. In Australia, it was described as a "manual for those who wanted to become pedophiles," part of the European critics blamed the director for the exaggerated harshness of the story, and in the United States, it wasn't even distributed. But let's proceed in order.

First of all, the models. It is clear that Araki references the sacred monsters of independent cinema and from the Van Sant school of "My Own Private Idaho" and "Elephant," to Almodovar's "What Have I Done to Deserve This?" even recovering the essential traits of his previous works (such as the lesser "The Doom Generation" but it's not about self-citation). In the analogies, we find fundamental and quite obvious diversifications if one considers that both Van Sant and Almodovar depict, in a degraded scenario, characters who realize themselves in their instinctuality without the pretense of being more than a body, sometimes as a consequence of a form of alienation (the former) or as a simple life choice (the latter). Araki's feature film also calls upon the transcendence from the most sordid materiality to focus attention not only on the psychological aspects that make up much of the scenic action but also on the dimension of the dream.

In fact, the characters seem almost to bifurcate along two parallel lines; that of "Who am I really and what happened to me" and that of "Who do I have to pretend to be to forget what happened to me." For this reason, the viewer ends up identifying their point of view with Brian's perspective, who believes he was abducted by aliens, to the point that the film seems to also include a sci-fi element. The state of estrangement surrounding the protagonists is transmitted through the director's great visionary talents and is interrupted through the strongest scenes of the work, such as Neil's rape and his memories in the coach's house, or the moments of terror that the fragile Brian often falls victim to. The more than good acting by the actors, from Joseph Gordon Levitt to Elisabeth Shue, from Brady Corbett to Michelle Trachtenberg, also helps engage the audience. However, many actors must, as per the script, maintain a marginal role because there is no space in the story for other characters besides the two boys and the coach. Everything revolves around one's guilt and the consequences of these on the other two.

A disservice to himself this "Mysterious Skin" for Araki, often defined as a pop director with an acidic style. Compared to previous works in the aforementioned film, the images evoke less visual power and everything is placed in the hands of the screenplay and the performers. With excellent results.