Michelle Trachtenberg

"On the evidence of his past work, one wouldn’t think Gregg Araki would have a film as powerful and sharply focused as Mysterious Skin in him. " 4 1/2 stars!

****½

On the evidence of his past work, one wouldn’t think Gregg Araki would have a film as powerful and sharply focused as Mysterious Skin in him.

But with this adaptation of Scott Heim’s semi- autobio-graphical novel, the indie filmmaker escapes the limited, brash cynicism of his earlier films - the "teen apocalypse" trilogy - and produces his best, most emotionally resonant film.

Araki has never shied from controversial issues or graphic lurid content, but Mysterious Skin’s subject is, the most confrontational he has explored.

Like The Woodsman, the film offers a fresh, but no less heart-wrenching perspective on child abuse. But unlike that film, it specifically observes the abuse from the victims’ eyes.

The story traces how, in the summer of 1981, two eight-year-old Little League baseball players, Neil McCormick (Chase Ellison) and Brian Lackey (George Webster), were sexually abused by their coach (a brilliant Bill Sage) and subsequently register wildly different experiences and coping mechanisms in response to the incident.

Ten years on, Neil (Joseph Gordon- Levitt), who recollects being infatuated with the coach ("he was like the firemen and lifeguards in mom’s Playgirl magazines"), now works as a small-time hustler, comfortable enough with his own sexuality to hook in "johns" with blase arrogance.

Meanwhile, Brian (Brady Corbet) is a nervous, soft-spoken nerd who believes he was abducted by aliens. He remembers little, and is obsessed with solving the mystery behind his blackouts, nosebleeds and the shadowy figures haunting his dreams.

Oscillating between searing heartbreak and lushly imagined beauty, Mysterious Skin is an extremely frank portrayal of childhood trauma warping the victims’ perceptions of reality and is brave and unsettling in its refusal to relay their experiences as a one-dimensional torture session.

Deeply entrenched in small-town malaise (it’s set somewhere in Kansas), the film, despite its heavy duty subject matter, is imbued with a strange, drifting weightlessness that introduces a slightly heightened reality to the proceedings and complements the confused, out-of-body memories of its characters. It is enriched by the dreamy score of Harold Budd and Robyn Guthrie, whose pillowy ambient soundscapes of minimal synth washes and reverb-drenched guitar wrap the viewer in a womb-like embrace.

The eye-popping visual schemes of Araki’s previous films occasionally appear - the candy-coloured cereal raining on Neil, the snow falling at the drive-in - but he doesn’t flinch from grimy reality where it’s required. This is no more evident than in Neil’s move to New York, where hustling becomes increasingly fraught with danger. This exposes the distressing, vulnerable truth of his plight. An encounter with the reptilian, pony-tailed, lesion-covered Billy Drago is wincingly creepy and sad, and the brutal beating and rape at hands of a boorish client is one of the toughest, most harrowing scenes you’ll see this year.

Yet for all the film’s graphic sexual nature, Araki’s masterful editing and compositions never allow things to become too explicit, just frighteningly suggestive.

AdvertisementAdvertisementThe film is stunningly acted, even down to the smaller roles, including Elizabeth Shue as Neil’s caring single mum and Michelle Trachtenberg (Buffy) as his best friend. But particularly outstanding, with daring, poignant clarity, is Gordon-Levitt (3rd Rock From The Sun); his climactic meeting with Corbet as they try to reconcile their pasts, has a cathartic blow of shuddering intensity.

Mysterious Skin is rated R18. Opens Thursday. (NZ)