Extreme makeover
Marina de Van's In My Skin enters and exits the cutting room.

By Johnny Ray Huston

IT'S NO SURPRISE Marina de Van's In My Skin is one of this year's most unsettling films. When de Van made her onscreen debut as a dead-eyed drifter in François Ozon's See the Sea, she – perhaps even more than her director – was intent on attacking audience complacency. The first time I interviewed the bitingly candid Ozon, I mentioned de Van, who also had a supporting role in his follow-up, Sitcom. With a grimace, he somewhat impolitely inferred they were prone to arguments about her portrayals. Today, it's worth noting those disagreements didn't prevent him from soliciting his fellow Fémis film school graduate's assistance on the screenplays for Under the Sand and 8 Women.

Slim, chic, and determinedly upwardly mobile, Esther – the character de Van embodies in her first feature – scarcely resembles the chunky, murderous vagabond of See the Sea. But surfaces can be deceptive: In My Skin outdoes See the Sea's bloody exploration of female physicality and psychology. With stark, direct intensity, the film follows Esther through her public life and her private life. At work she lobbies for a promotion, inciting the jealousy of a friend and coworker (Léa Drucker, who alternately resembles Marianne Faithfull and, amusingly, Ozon's other major muse, Ludivine Sagnier). At home with her boyfriend (Laurent Lucas), she favors glib, romantic small talk and discussing real estate plans. But when Esther is by herself, she is drawn – obsessively – to a wound on her right leg. Though it stems from an accident, she soon begins making alterations and additions to the initial gash.

"I was told no one wanted to see a film about self-mutilation," de Van says, discussing In My Skin's genesis and production during a phone interview. "And because the film has no star – I'm not a famous name – perhaps there was some hesitation. Also, I was both the director and lead actor. But I had funding problems primarily because of the subject." Free from her past work "servicing" Ozon's imagination, de Van locked In My Skin's shot breakdown in place during the writing process, until lack of financing forced some adjustments: "I had to cut into the screenplay, and I had to rethink the shooting plan. Though the subject matter remained the same, many of the images changed."

The images de Van creates are powerful partly because In My Skin never provides a simplified explanation of, or self-help prescription for, Esther's self-cutting. In fact, gasping and shuddering, Esther revels in the act to a degree that appears autoerotic. Her solitary escapes have a covert quality similar to illicit meetings with a lover: twice she checks into a hotel room so she can allow her impulses free rein. In My Skin also contains a pair of sequences in which Esther is forced to hide when someone nearby notices blood drops and cutlery. The irony of these social intrusions is that they suddenly place her in the roles of both aggressor and victim.

Within the male-dominated realm of commercial features, de Van's film evokes and challenges a variety of well-known touchstones. Though she doesn't consider In My Skin a horror film, it does have links to that genre. It's closest French relative would have to be Georges Franju's Eyes Without a Face, a work from 1960 that eerily presages – and functions as a critique of – contemporary television's devotion to extreme makeovers. In My Skin's chilly views of urban exteriors (glass domes, grid patterns, and various architectural forms dominated by repetition) call to mind the sterile, almost barren cityscapes in early David Cronenberg works such as Shivers (1975) and Rabid (1977). De Van's use of a divided screen evokes Brian De Palma's films, 1973's Sisters in particular.

But while Sisters – a Siamese bad dream in which Margot Kidder is possessed by the murderous impulses of her dead twin – shares In My Skin's graft attacks, de Van's approach is different. De Palma's split-screen usage broadens suspense and teases the audience's voyeurism, but it's only symbolically – never directly – linked to the fractured identity of Kidder's character. De Van's use of the tactic is complicatedly, circuitously joined to Esther's own perception. The film's opening credits present split-screen photographic stills that introduce the character's environment; when the dual imagery returns, near the end of the film, Esther has purchased a camera to document her rituals as they grow increasingly savage and surgical.

"The divided screen is showing two different things in the same place at the same time," de Van says, describing the latter scene. "It functions as a kind of parallel editing. It's a way of showing the fragmentation Esther's experiencing. She's losing a connection to the whole and focusing on the details. It is, of course, my body that's being shown. The left side of the screen is the left side of the body, and the right screen is the right side of the body. The separation between the two is really very small."

But de Van's main directorial link isn't to Franju, Cronenberg, or De Palma (or Ozon, for that matter). Her film's likenesses to Roman Polanski's 1965 Repulsion are broad – both films tail a female protagonist with relentless, oppressive tenacity – and specific. In My Skin's score, by E.S.T., echoes the jazzy dissonance of the compositions Christopher Komeda created for Polanski's early features (although Chico Hamilton is responsible for Repulsion's Komeda-style score). In visual terms, de Van sometimes overtly references Repulsion. During one of Esther's hotel room retreats, the image of her face is distorted by a mirrorlike ceiling fixture, a touch that's similar to the moment a metal tea kettle reflects Catherine Deneuve's warped image in Polanski's movie.

Polanski himself paid overt homage to predecessors such as Cocteau (the grasping hands of Beauty and the Beast) and Hitchcock. It's possible to draw a line from Psycho's slowly retreating stare at Marian Crane's dead eye, to the iris-nightmare of Repulsion's opening credits, to the final sequence of In My Skin. But a comparison of the three films' perspectives proves de Van adds a distinct view of female subjectivity to these formidable influences. At one point during Repulsion, the camera slowly creeps toward Deneuve's shattered character as she's sprawled on a bed. The unblinking final sequence of In My Skin both multiplies and reverses this shot. Simultaneously signaling a break in Esther's psyche and offering a hint of release, de Van also reveals how thoroughly she's placed viewers within her protagonist's state of being.

The experience doesn't look as bloody as it feels: de Van's writer-director-star approach yields a unique flinch-inducing form of intimacy and identification that conflicts with Hitchcock's and Polanski's (not necessarily inferior) tendency toward voyeurism. A lesser talent would have created a cinematic piece of performance art, but de Van is true to her commanding, bizarre screen presence: at times she resembles a feral Shelley Duvall; at other times she's the missing link between P.J. Harvey's injury-licking Rid of Me persona and the feminine monster of To Bring You My Love. Ultimately, In My Skin's effectiveness stems from the fierce yet blissful manner in which de Van renders a violence that might double for the wide varieties of everyday "damage" people compulsively inflict on their bodies; Esther's self-cutting can function as a metaphor for any number of addictions. In this case, the literal becomes poetic.