Philip Ridley's fairytale for the disenfranchised is a gothic masterpiece with a dreamlike quality and a nightmarish narrative
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There are many reasons to love Philip Ridley's stunningly beautiful film The Reflecting Skin, a gothic masterpiece that is often strangely overlooked.
Seen through the eyes of 10-year-old Seth Dove (Jeremy Cooper), the film is populated by the damaged denizens of a small town in rural Idaho. As it opens, Seth's family is on the brink of collapse, his mother slipping into religious insanity, his father deeply depressed by some dark secret. His elder brother, Cameron, played by a young Viggo Mortensen, has returned from military service traumatised and suffering from a mysterious physical affliction. Cameron becomes romantically involved with Dolphin Blue (Lindsay Duncan), a local widow whom Seth is convinced is a vampire, intent on sucking the lifeblood from his brother. "The nightmare of childhood," as Dolphin remarks to Seth. "Innocence can be Hell".
Like a Flannery O'Connor story adapted by David Lynch, with Terrence Malick shooting second unit, the film has a dreamlike quality that softens the nightmarish narrative. Indeed, Ridley places the story a definite second to the visuals, creating painterly images that at once seduce and unnerve. A former art student, the East End-based director has said in interviews that the film was inspired by a series of his own paintings of an imagined, mythical American landscape. The black Cadillac that cruises into the town like a shadow passing across the sun, its occupants enticing away Seth's young friends one by one, first appeared in the background of these paintings.
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Which brings us to Lindsay Duncan's frog-splattered visage. Decidedly not what Gloria Swanson had in mind when she famously informed Mr DeMille she was ready for her closeup, the image is nevertheless a very beautiful one. Seth and friends have rigged a frog to explode, as cheeky Idahoan boys are wont to do, and Dolphin is their unsuspecting victim. Ridley frames Dolphin's face against the blue sky, the paleness of her skin accentuated by the black of her headscarf and sunglasses, her delicate, crystalline beauty defiled by a generous, red splattering of blood.
Beneath all this gothic texturing, this terrible beauty, what gives the film its power is its emotional truthfulness. In all families, to a greater or lesser degree, there sleeps some repressed secret, and by the end of the film Seth has become aware of the truth about his own. (Spoiler alert!) His brother is suffering radiation sickness; Dolphin is just a lonely widow, heartbroken and obsessed with the memory of her husband; and the burden borne by his suicidal father is repressed homosexuality.
The family is Ridley's most recurring theme, running through his plays and his novels for children. These books are set in poor urban areas made fantastical by Ridley's prose, and filled with wonderfully eccentric characters in dysfunctional families, the young protagonists dealing with "the nightmare of childhood" bravely and imaginatively. His fiction is a gift to children born into difficult circumstances – fairytales for the disenfranchised.
I once saw Philip Ridley at a train station, dressed in black and sporting a pork-pie hat. I wanted very much to thank him for the pleasure his books had given my son, but by the time I had plucked up the courage to approach him and begun crossing the footbridge to the platform opposite, a train had whisked him away. So, in the hope that he may glance up from his work and see this: thank you, sir.
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Source: http://www.theguardian.com/film/2013/aug/30/lindsay-duncan-reflecting-skin-why-i-love
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