The Man Who Sold His Skin
The Syrian civil war is just a starting point for The Man Who Sold His Skin — a Best International Feature Oscar nominee for 2020. A Syrian man named Sam (Yahya Mahayni) is forced to flee the country after a video of him spouting “revolutionary” nonsense on a train reaches the authorities. The film then largely abandons Syria and becomes a parable about powerless refugees and the heartlessness of the rich, represented by a Belgian celebrity artist, Jeffrey Godefroi (Koen De Bouw). Godefroi offers Sam a worry-free life if he will allow Godefroi to tattoo his back and drag him around the world as an art commodity for voiceless display.
Tunisian writer-director Kaouther Ben Hania has a lot on her mind and a subtly dramatic visual sense that underlines her concerns. An abundance of mirrors suggests the duplicity of just about everyone — even Sam is volatile and caustic — and the formal, static artworks that surround Sam, trapped and seething, remind us of the arbitrary standards that give any art cachet and monetary value.
Threading through everything is a love story. Sam’s boisterous marriage proposal to Abeer (Dea Liane), his beautiful but weak Syrian girlfriend, is what gets him into trouble in the first place, and his desire to get to Belgium, where Abeer is living with the Syrian diplomat she felt forced to marry, is what convinces Sam to accept artistic slavery.
Unfortunately, the romance is the film’s weakest link, since it’s hard to understand what the steely Sam sees in mousy Abeer, nor what she sees in Sam, who’s generally rude, unpredictable, and toxically jealous. Maybe opposites attract, and there’s an end to it?
No matter, their love is mostly used to drive the plot, which continues in satirical fashion to skewer refugee advocates, art collectors, journalists, and anyone else Ben Hania can manage to rope into the story. If there’s a hero, it’s more Godefroi than Sam, since the artist is frank about his cynicism and remains in control to the end. Sam is just a cypher for the expression of everyone else’s worst impulses.
The Man Who Sold His Skin is a remarkably creative and intriguing film, and it gets increasingly weird as it goes, ending rather abruptly with a twist that seems to negate much of what has come before. But it’s always visually striking and thematically provocative, with plenty of hooks on which to hang whatever moral condemnations a viewer might like to offer. If it were a novel, it would be the perfect choice for a book club, since it encourages discussion without settling on any definitive conclusion of its own.
Remarkably, the premise is not the director’s fantasy but her fictionalization of a real person, a Swiss fellow named Tim Steiner, whose back was tattooed by real-life Belgian artist Wim Delvoye (who has a cameo in the film as an insurance executive). The art on Tim’s back was sold to a collector in 2008 for 150,000 euros, and he spends much of his time sitting motionless in art galleries, on display. When he dies, the collector (or a subsequent owner) will have the right to remove the skin from his body for preservation and continuing display. Sometimes life is indeed stranger than the movies.
Grade: B. Not rated, but PG-13 equivalent. Now available for rental via the Grail Moviehouse website.
(Photos: Courtesy of Tanit Films)
