SF Indie Fest: White Skin
Man, you think you know a film ... you think you know where it's headed ... you think you can see the ending a mile away before it's even halfway done ... and then it sticks its finger in your eye and runs completely the other way. White Skin starts off looking like a slow, ominous love story about a slightly crazy nebbish, but then totally uppercuts the audience by dragging in elements of "The X-Files" (or, if you prefer your media references more pretentious, elements of Cronenberg). Take note, fans of creepy-sexy thrillers: White Skin will be shown again on Friday, the 11th, at 9:30 at the Roxie; you won't be disappointed. (Watch out, though, it's subtitled ... so don't make the same neck-destroying mistake we did by sitting in the front row.)
But first, a word from local filmie Tom Pankratz, whose short film Wayward precedes White Skin. Tom's been making films in the bay area for several years, and we like him -- at a Q&A after Wayward, he referred to talented actors as "the best production value you can get," which sounds like a good attitude to have. Wayward is a quiet story about a snippy white lady whose car barrels into an Indie Film Archetype; in this case, it's a blend of The Magical Black Man and The Wise Hobo. A few statements are made about the relative irony of their stations in life, and in the end they both learn An Important Lesson and become friends, although for the life of us we can't understand why. At any rate, it's a nicely acted, well-shot, just-the-right-lengthed little short, and though the moral of the story feels a little forced, it's certainly stronger than nine-tenths of the indie shorts out there.
And now, on to the feature presentation, which features hottt sex, sassy black ladies, and lots of blood. Hopefully not all at once.
Thierry is a shy nerd whose flickery eye contact and self-absorbtion make him seem ever-so-slightly unhinged, but in a harmless, graceful sort of way. His friend Henri is a much more direct alpha-male, and he obtains them both some hookers to mark Thierry's birthday. Ever the mensch, Thierry declines sex when alone with his Hooker With a Heart of Gold, and instead makes conversation. He's just confessing to her that redheads make him nauseous (with their pale, veiny skin) when Henri starts screaming from the hotel room next door -- unlucky in love, Henri's streetwalker has slashed his throat.
Thierry and Henri make an escape, blood spurting pretty ickily from Henri's neck. They concoct a story about skinheads so that nobody will know that they hired hookers, and feel confident that the event is behind them. This prologue lasts, oh, maybe 10 minutes, but even once it's over, the tension set up by this sequence stays with you for the rest of the film. It's really tight, really visceral stuff, heightened considerably from remarkable performances all around. It's probably the strongest part of the film.
The incident with the hookers seemingly behind them, Thierry and Henri move on with their lives. Thierry suddenly falls head over heels for a mysterious flautist named Claire, and his mission to woo her becomes an obsession. "A week ago my life accounted for nothing," he tells this almost-complete-stranger, "now your face is printed on my brain and I haven't been able to get it out." What a creep! Every time he opens his mouth, you want to cringe, afraid that he's going to spook Claire. Ah, but perhaps it is she who will spook him. Or something.
Something weird is going on with Claire. She confesses to Thierry that she has cancer, but her medical exams show further abnormalities. Her family is wicked bizarre. And creepiest of all, Thierry unexpectedly finds that she is connected to the evil hooker from the beginning. It is about here that the movie lurches into Highly Bizarre mode, suddenly demanding that the audience suspend its disbelief about a billion miles higher than it previously had. During Tuesday's screening, when it became obvious where the story was heading, the audience laughed nervously -- having enjoyed what was, until now, a weird romance, we weren't quite ready to follow it somewhere potentially supernatural.
But White Skin coaxes us along very nicely. Henri, whose traditional Haitian upbringing leaves him open to supernatural possibilities, gets frustrated at Thierry's Scullyish denial of what seems to be happening: "Magic, spirits, zombies, racism -- if you don't see it, it doesn't exist!" Race is an intermittent motif; Henri's aunt opines that blacks are the purest form of humanity, and the other races "bizarre variations...whites are like mutants with diluted genes." Claire's family makes vague reference to race as well, though they seem a bit more preoccupied with feminist theory.
For a film whose freaking TITLE is about skin color, we were sort of expecting more play from the race card; as it is, race sort of hobbles along as a theme, only popping up now and then. Our guess (based on the title, and the actors' tendency to deliver lines about skin color as if pronouncing a doctoral thesis) is that the creepy terrors of White Skin are meant as thoughtful comments on race -- or maybe gender? Hard to say. Like any good, thoughtful thriller (like Videodrome, or a really good "X-Files," or Rebecca, or The Exorcist), the success of "White Skin" depends on striking the right balance between Perils and Ideas; White Skin does an excellent job of finessing the spooky Perils, but in the end, the Ideas all seem crammed in at the last minute.