When Carine Adler was raising the money to make her first feature film, Under The Skin, some potential backers dismissed its subject matter as too slight. The differing responses of two sisters to the sudden death of their mother might have looked a bit thin on paper, but the finished work has evinced strong reactions and won a string of awards for its English director at film festivals from Edinburgh to Toronto.
It may be a debut, low-budget film, but its stark lighting, handheld photography, anonymous urban locations and chic soundtrack have evoked comparisons with Kieslowski and Wong Kar-Wai. Its immediacy, intimacy and emotional rawness have won it critical acclaim as an untypical British film by a director in her 40s.
The point of view of the film is that of the younger sister, the pretty, 19-year-old Iris (Samantha Morton), who reacts to the death of her mother by leaving her job, abandoning her steady boyfriend and quarrelling with her married sister, Rose. As she attempts to lose herself in a series of self-destructive sexual encounters, Iris's sexual obsession becomes a displacement activity through which she blocks out her feelings about her mother.
Seediness is glamorised in the night scenes shot by Barry Ackroyd in saturated colours, in a visual style reminiscent of Mike Figgis's Leaving Las Vegas, as Iris trawls bars and nightclubs for sexual partners, dressed bizarrely in her mother's fur coat and blonde wig. Inhabiting an alcoholdrenched, blurry world of fantasy and neediness, she becomes increasingly alienated from everyone who cares about her, and increasingly desperate.
"Iris is difficult from the very beginning," Carine Adler says, on a visit to Dublin last weekend. "Some viewers will feel distant from her for that reason. I didn't make it easy for the audience by creating a sympathetic character who gets into difficulties. I wanted to do an anti-heroine. But watching her is an emotional experience, not an intellectual one, so I'm not surprised if people don't get it."
Constantly looking at herself from the outside as an object of desire, Iris is absorbed in images of herself having sex, which she recreates in a voiceover for her private arousal. This presentation of the narcissistic element of her sexuality is deliberately ambiguous, rendered with a glossy, erotic allure which could be seen as a calculating attempt to titillate. Adler is walking the fine line between presenting debauched behaviour and celebrating or exploiting it. Yet she has been surprised to be told by some female viewers that the film made them want to go out and have sex - although others have found it disturbingly voyeuristic.
"I can't control people's reactions, of course. I felt that female sexuality was under-represented on screen and I wanted to explore some of the issues around that. If people react to it in simplistic or stereotypical ways, that's their choice."
The basis of the creation of the character of Iris was Adler's reading of Mother, Madonna, Whore, a study of aspects of female sexuality, written by a psychiatrist, Estella Weldon, who was also a script consultant on Under The Skin. "Her theory is that women act out their anger on themselves through various kinds of compulsive behaviour, including sex," Adler says, "while men direct their anger outwards through crime or abuse of women. Women are destructive to themselves and to their bodies, rather than to other people."
Hmmm. In Under The Skin, Iris's anger seems to be directed as much outwards as inwards, as may be observed in her treatment of her sister and of her boyfriend, Gary, as well as in the way she uses men for sex. Adler first disagrees that Iris's treatment of Gary is callous, then defends her characterisation. "Why should she be compassionate to him? Why should I make a nice film about a nice woman who is understanding and sympathetic? That's the way we like to see ourselves and there are enough films about that. Anyway, he wasn't understanding to her."
Estella Weldon was also instrumental in adding the late resolution of the film, in which Iris is rescued from spiralling nihilism by an emotional reconciliation with her sister, Rose. "I realised that the audience, and the protagonists, need to be given some insight into what's going on, into the sibling rivalry. It's important for all that anger to be explained, otherwise there's no insight into human nature. It's not a happy ending, though. It's an ending with possibilities."
While this is obviously a film "about" female representation in film, it's tempting to speculate how it would work if the genders were reversed, with Iris replaced by an angry, unhappy young man attempting to dissolve his grief in promiscuity. Would he be a more or less sympathetic character? "I hadn't thought about that at all. It's an interesting question. I can't help feeling that if it were a young man he would behave differently; his sexual behaviour would be more aggressive, he would abuse or exploit women."
That revealing assumption is consistent with the sketchy portrayal of the male characters in Under The Skin, who are little more than cyphers. The presence of a father in the sisters' lives was something that Adler had considered adding: "I did have a strand about their father, but it just seemed to be a separate story and I scrapped it.
"I'm very familiar with the allfemale world of the film - I grew up in a very matriarchal family. And it's Iris's story; she was the one I was interested in. I suppose I don't really know men." No more than Iris does.
Under The Skin opens at the IFC, Dublin, on December 27th.