The Skin Blu-ray Movie

Rating summary

Movie		3.5
Video		4.0
Audio		3.5
Extras		3.5
Overall		3.5

The Skin Blu-ray Movie Review

If beauty is only skin deep, what's ugliness?

Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman January 6, 2015

There’s a casual ebullience to the Italian spirit that is distinctly at odds with the more martinet tendencies of the Germans, something that tends to play into how these different peoples responded to many of the same impulses and influences during the World War II era. While the Germans engaged in a sort of nefarious “groupthink,” with the pernicious “philosophies” of Hitler, Goebbels and the entire Nazi crew seeming to permeate the body politic in an almost subliminal way, in Italy things were at least relatively more chaotic and undisciplined. It was, in fact, as if much of the Italian populace reacted to the growing waves of Fascism and, ultimately, war, with a somewhat impatient, “Hey, what’s all the fuss about? I’m trying to drink my wine here!” This is obviously a somewhat crass overgeneralization, but there are hints of this very attitude running rampant just beneath the surface of Liliana Cavani’s 1981 opus The Skin. Cavani, probably best known stateside for her immensely controversial 1974 film The Night Porter, is not especially reserved in her approach toward depictions of brutality, or for her none too subtle provocations of what she may see as a too docile viewing public. Cavani’s predilections are on full display in The Skin, though she’s a rather wily craftswoman with this film, seducing the audience with what on its surface appears to be a rather mundane tale of Italy (and largely Naples) as World War II comes to close, but which soon enough begins to traffic in the darker shadows of men’s (and women’s) souls, including some graphic imagery which makes the film uncomfortable viewing at best. Cavani based her film on a controversial set of stories by Italian war correspondent Curzio Malaparte, which was also entitled The Skin, and which appeared in 1949, quickly drawing both acclaim and condemnation (the Vatican put it on the "forbidden" books Codex).

Curzio Malaparte is not a name that’s that well known on this side of the pond, but he was a rather well regarded journalist and war correspondent in Italy, one who had openly flirted with Fascism in its nascent days in the nation, but who, like so many others, soon started to see the terrors the movement was inflicting, ultimately moving more toward the Communist end of the sociopolitical spectrum. Malaparte’s wartime dispatches were often unflinching, if also rather unexpectedly poetic, offering a distinctively Italian perspective on the horrors of battle. (Ironically, Malaparte was half-German, born with the name Kurt Erich Suckert. He later took the pseudonym Malaparte as a play on Napoleon Bonaparte. If Bonaparte in Italian translates more or less to “the good side,” one can infer what “Malaparte” was supposed to represent.)

Now even war correspondents have been known to traffic in a certain amount of whimsy, something I know from personal experience. My own late father was featured in a series of stories by vaunted American World War II correspondent A.J. Liebling built around a kind of counterculture grunt named Mollie, who just so happened to be under my father’s command in several campaigns (coincidentally including the Allied Italian campaign which plays into The Skin). These stories were a regular feature in The New Yorker during World War II and my Dad was a recurring character in them, though the word “character” should be taken at face value, for there’s little doubt that Liebling exaggerated certain traits and dramatized various elements to make for better storytelling. In much the same way Malaparte’s Italian musings tend to filter actual wartime experiences through his slowly evolving sociopolitical awarenesses, and so should not be taken at face value, or at least as traditionally “objective” reportage.

With that in mind, it’s obvious that Cavani almost wants to taunt the audience with an initial apprehension that the film will be dealing with an incoming American General named Mark Clark (Burt Lancaster, rather badly dubbed into Italian), who comes into contact with Malaparte (Marcello Mastroianni) in the wake of the German retreat. The Americans are in fact not “greeted as liberators” (to purloin a phrase from contemporary parlance), but are seen as simply the latest in a long string of unwanted invaders. That ebullient, nonchalant spirit of the everyday Italian is on display in several early scenes, as in one sequence where a young American (Ken Marshall) wants to know “where the Fascists are,” only to be greeted with a casually sanguine, “There are no Fascists here” by a smiling populace. The general sentiment from the Italians therefore seems to be “would you all just leave us alone?” in so many words.

That “we want to be alone” ethos becomes something of a mask, however, as Cavani starts exploring some frankly Fellini-esque degradations of the Italian soul in the wake of the German collapse. Moral turpitude abounds (think Fellini Satyricon in its most florid formulations), and there are any number of extremely troubling depictions of various sordid activities which may remind some of the more nettlesome aspects of The Night Porter. The (intentionally) ironic thing about some of this is the wide eyed innocence of the Americans is played rather artfully against the jaded, “been there, seen that” demeanor of the Italians, even as the Americans are shocked by the decrepitude they witness, while the Italians seem to be taking everything more or less in stride.

As with Malaparte himself, there’s little doubt that Cavani is trying to offer up a quasi-verité, documentarian point of view here—no, this is just as much a personal statement on the part of the director as it was for Malaparte in its literary form, and therefore needs to be seen through the prism of Cavani’s own reactions to both her native nation as well as what she probably sees as American interlopers. Those who unavoidably view the Americans as the “obvious” heroes in any World War II saga may therefore be brought up a bit short by the less complimentary subtext that lingers here. But Cavani is an equal opportunity offender, so to speak. She’s just as harsh on her fellow countrymen, showing the decay that was not just part of the Fascist movement, but which ironically seemed to outlive it and which morphed into new and troubling forms.

The Skin Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

The Skin is presented on Blu-ray courtesy of Cohen Film Collection with an AVC encoded 1080p transfer in 1.35:1. Commentators Klein and Major discuss the somewhat unusual choice of Academy Ratio (more or less, anyway) for this film, but the fact is the narrower aspect ratio offers Cavani and her DP Armando Nannuzzi plenty of opportunity to stuff the frame with an almost claustrophobic aggregation of characters. That gives several key sequences of the film a cloistered, crowded appearance that helps to increase an almost subliminal level of anxiety. Cavani's palette is somewhat subdued throughout the film, exploiting browns and beiges as much as anything, though a couple of picturesque sequences by the seaside offer luscious blue skies and appealing white sands. Detail is excellent throughout the presentation, with a nicely organic appearance offering a well resolved grainfield. Contrast is also strong and consistent, though Cavani has a tendency to shoot into light sometimes where the backlit spill can add a hint of softness (see screenshot 1). There are a couple of very minor stability issues with anomalies like minimal judder appearing in pans, but overall this is a solid, appealing transfer of a film that isn't "beautiful" by any stretch of the imagination, but which offers several images which will probably be burnt into viewers' memories long after the final fade out has occurred.

The Skin Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

The Skin features an Italian LPCM 2.0 mono track that exhibits many of the almost surreal weirdnesses that tend to accompany Italian films that are post-looped, either in part or in whole. The voice actor utilized for Burt Lancaster will probably grate on many Americans' ears, simply because Lancaster's real voice is so distinctive. But it's also apparent that even Mastroianni has revoiced some of his lines, with lips quite often having little to do with the words coming out of them (the commentary suggests he spoke English in his scenes with Lancaster and then dubbed them into Italian). Fidelity wise everything is fine if unremarkable. There's a kind of flat, shallow aspect to much of the sound here that really only perks up when Lalo Schifrin's appealing score is on display.

The Skin Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

• At the Frontier of the Apocalypse (1080p; 24:22) looks at the film's source stories and the Italian experience in World War II in general.


• Malaparte, Great Reporter (1080p; 7:08) is an interesting interview with director Liliane Cavani.


• The Individual and History (1080p; 7:44) is more from the Cavani interview, focusing on her thoughts about intimate stories within epochal historical events.


• Dante Feretti Revisits Naples (1080p; 5:50) is another nice interview, this time with the film's production designer.


• Original French Release Trailer (1080p; 3:01)


• 2014 Re-Release Trailer (1080p; 1:46)


• Feature Length Audio Commentary by Film Critics Wade Major and Andy Klein. Major and Klein are quickly becoming the go to guys for Cohen Film Collection commentaries, and they do another really interesting and insightful job here, going over the source material, Cavani's filmography and various themes that are explored. Speaking of themes, music geeks like I am may not be able to forgive the pair for attributing the theme from The Man from U.N.C.L.E. to The Skin's composer Lalo Schifrin. That was Jerry Goldsmith (arranged and conducted by Hugo Montenegro), gents.

The Skin Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

Perhaps appropriately, given the roiling epoch being depicted, the politics in The Skin are a bit muddled, and will probably be especially troublesome for American audiences expecting "our guys" to be unabashed heroes. There's a rather decadent aspect to The Skin which will come as no surprise to those who have seen The Night Porter, but which will still tend to rattle certain cages. Cavani is a bit of an acquired taste, and those who have already whetted their appetites with The Night Porter will find much the same dark ambience here, albeit weirdly combined with an inherent American optimism and equally inherent Italian effervescence. Technical merits are strong, and the supplementary package is excellent. Recommended.