Venice Film Festival 2013: Never Trust a Beautiful Woman in a Transit Van

It was touch and go there for a while; some reckoned they wouldn’t come. Bleary-eyed critics were despairing at the thought of having to file another three star review. But midway through the festival two great movies have emerged. One was greeted by rapturous applause, the other by howls of despair from the small number of philistines who haunt the Lido.

The film that got booed once the lights went up was Jonathan Glazer’s astonishing Under the Skin (*****), an intoxicating sci-fi fever dream starring Scarlett Johansson as a beautiful being not of this world, who drives around Govan in a white transit van looking to pick up locals to be part of some kind of sexy body-harvesting sacrifice. If you haven’t guess already, Under the Skin is bonkers. It’s also the best film screening at Venice.

Opening with an impressionistic audio-visual mind-fuck that recalls the final chapter of Kubrick’s 2001, we first meet Johansson’s unnamed alien naked in a white room, where she’s delivered her first victim by a mysterious biker who appears to be her minder. It’s a female of dubious dress sense – stonewash jeans, leather boots – whose clothes she commandeers (Johansson adds a fur coat to her uniform on a shopping spree). She then takes to the streets of No Mean City to hunt.

Seeing the world through her eyes is unnerving. Glazer shoots Glasgow and its inhabitants like it’s they who are from another planet. In a scene where she walks down Trongate it’s hard to tell if Johansson is in character as she gawps at the surroundings, or if the Hollywood A-lister is confused by the seemingly-never-ending succession of shops selling leather jackets.

These cinema verité moments – filmed with hidden cameras – of Glaswegians going about their business unaware that a Hollywood actor is wandering among them or that they’ll be part of this extraordinary movie, prove as uncanny as the scenes inside Johansson’s lair, a building that from the outside looks like a dilapidated tenement but inside reveals a vast, futuristic room with black walls, ceiling and floor. It’s here that she coerces her entranced victims to stride into an onyx pool of viscous liquid, like sailors wading into the drink towards a siren.

Why does she do this? It’s not clear. Where is she from? That’s not explained either. The plot is as opaque as a misty morning in the Highlands (where the second half of the film takes place). What is clear is that this is a meditation on loneliness and desire containing some of the wildest sounds (the brilliant nerve-shredding score is by Mica Levi) and most vivid images you’ll see all year. All this plus, in the moment when Johansson’s alien inspects a previously unknown part of her anatomy with a table lamp, the biggest belly-laugh of the festival. Mr Bertolucci, ignore the philistines. Give this the Golden Lion!

It’s taken Glazer 13 years to make three movies (as well as Under the Skin, there’s the brilliant Sexy Beast (2001) and the even better Birth (2004)). If he was ever incline to accelerate his productivity he could do worse than look to the example of Québécois wonderkid Xavier Dolan, who, at only 24, has manage to make four features in the time it would have taken him to earn a master’s degree. His latest, Tom at the Farm (*****), is undoubtably his best yet and it joins Under the Skin as the festival’s other standout.

The setup and execution is pure Polanski. Tom (played by Dolan) is holed up in an isolated farmhouse with the family of his recently deceased boyfriend Guillaume. He’s visiting for the funeral but the mother is under the impression that her youngest was straight and Guillaume’s thuggish older brother Francis (Pierre-Yves Cardinal) wants to keep it that way.

Tom and Francis begin a war of wills, but their relationship soon morphs into something darker as Francis repeatedly beats him and sets him to work on the farm. Stockholm syndrome sets in and Tom becomes accustomed to his mistreatment. In fact, he starts to like it; you could call this a sadomasochistic romance. This central relationship, which goes from vicious to absurd to romantic and back again, is rich with subtext and allegorical meaning – it’s no coincidence that Francis, Tom’s bullying, homophobic oppressor, wears a stars and stripes bomber jacket in several scenes.

Stylistically, Tom at the Farm is a huge departure from Dolan’s three previous features, which often felt like florid music videos rather than movies. Here he keeps the direction tight and tense. Perhaps the reason for his sensitive approach to the material is that for the first time this multitasking filmmaker (as well as acting and directing Dolan edits, writes and produces his pictures) is adapting someone else's story. Based on Michel Marc Bouchard’s play of the same name, Dolan makes great use of the chamber piece’s inherent claustrophobic atmosphere, but it never feels stagey.

As well as being Dolan’s best effort behind the camera, it’s also his finest work in front of it. Perhaps it was a hint of jealousy at his precocious talent and matinee idol good-looks, but I’ve always found him too self regarding on screen; in Heartbeats and I Killed My Mother he films himself like Josef von Sternberg would shoot Marlene Dietrich. There isn’t an ounce of vanity here, however. Even before he’s had the first of his many beatings Tom is disheveled, with the kind of ratty bleached blond mullet that only surfer-dudes or Kurt Cobain can pull off.

It’s a peculiar look, but I think I’ve discovered the source of its inspiration. When I spoke to Dolan after the screening he interrupted the interview to explain his deep love for Michelle Pfeiffer’s turn as Catwoman in Batman Returns, going so far as to completely reenact her transformation scene, ending his performance with the delicious line, “I don't know about you, Miss Kitty, but I feel so much yummier.” Catwoman, I’ll remind you, was also a kinky sadist with tangled blonde hair and a crush on the brute trying to kill her.