Can Go Through Skin (2009)

hyped garbage

A Masterpiece!

It is not deep, but it is fun to watch. It does have a bit more of an edge to it than other similar films.

It’s fine. It's literally the definition of a fine movie. You’ve seen it before, you know every beat and outcome before the characters even do. Only question is how much escapism you’re looking for.

A young woman was dumped by her boyfriend and as a result she goes totally crazy. The first thing i thought when i read this very short synopsis was "grow up!". She is a total emotional wreck, leaves the city to live in a ruin of a house and starts a very disturbed new life. We viewers are supposed to get involved into her miserable new life and the director uses sounds, internet conversations that are only partly show to us and quick camera shifting positions to do so. The woman, being totally messed up shoots several kittens and a guy after she lets them starve first and leaves a caught bird hanging in a net even when she is able to rescue the poor thing. I do not understand why directors of movies think they have a right to abuse animals to make a movie and score their artistic points.Therefore i give this pretentious movie a big fat zero.

If you are a director making a movie for a small market, and want to make a movie that is not intended for mass entertainment, you end up without any budget. "Kan door huid heen" is such a movie that was made with very little resources, and it shows. Nevertheless, through good directing, clever use of sound, and very good acting, this movie still achieves excellent quality; it brings over the experiences of the main character extremely well.While very well done with limited resources, I missed something watching this movie: Entertainment. After watching the movie I didn't feel like I had a pleasant 1 1/2 hours, more that I had watched the terrible misery of someone. While I have no problems with artistic films, they should at least to attempt to entertain the viewer in a basic way. That is completely lacking here and prevents me giving any good mark for this movie.

This film begins with a traumatic day for Marieke, its female protagonist: only hours after ending a romantic relationship she is brutally assaulted and almost drowned by a stranger. No longer able to feel safe in her urban home she moves to a large, dilapidated house in the country. Here she teeters on the brink of madness as she fantasizes about getting violent revenge on her attacker. At first her only contact with the outside world is through chat rooms, particularly with a certain man who insists that she should make her revenge fantasy a reality. The film is quite intense, at least partially due to some outstanding editing work and effective methods of capturing Marieke's interior state.The film also does an excellent job of utilizing space: the closed-in farmhouse offers a stark contrast to the open fields surrounding it. Throughout the film the visuals reflect Marieke's state of mind; the stifling close-ups of the farmhouse interiors are used to suggest her distress. As she begins to look outward and move past her trauma medium and long outdoor shots gradually become more prevalent.There are some important motifs in this film, sexuality, violence, and water all play a major role in both Marieke's injury and her recuperation. In fact the film has a nice bit of symmetry as major scenes in the beginning and end take place in a bathtub and a shower respectively; there is also the matter of a damaged drain which sets the recovery plot in motion.Anyway, this is one of the best 2009 films I've seen, it's worth your time for Rifka's Lodeizen's performance if nothing else.

Them main character of the movie is a woman called Marieke who has just gone through a breakup. Post-breakup behaviour for her is going through her list of boyfriends and people who have given her their numbers trying to get a rebound date whilst getting progressively drunker on the red wine. It's not going well, so she orders in the pepperoni pizza. Poor dear, no actually I can't sympathise.Unfortunately, what should have been tears before bedtime becomes trauma before bedtime as she and a female friend get violently assaulted by a man who invades her home.The rest of the film concerns Marieke in the countryside trying to renovate a house and rebuild her life. She has rage attacks, and fear attacks, and it's pretty horrible viewing at times. She dreams of torturing the rapist and actually does some pretty morally reprehensible things during her convalescence. One particularly nasty scene involves considering an abortion, and has Marieke having a conversation with her unborn baby trying to justify herself.What was interesting for me is that she uses the internet to get over her trauma, she goes on a messaging site, where she meets a character called Herfst who is sympathetic, but also later says some pretty terrible things. She has turned the rapist in and he has been sentenced, but Herfst says for example that it's her duty to kill the guy, or she'll be responsible the next time the guy rapes. So I was interested by the kind of dysfunction of internet relationships, where you take advice from people who don't really understand the context of your situation properly. I asked Esther Rots (who was present at the screening I went to at the EIFF) about this and she said that she didn't really see it in that way, for her the internet relationship was a good thing, that straight after the attack Marieke had no-one to talk to except this individual on the internet. Sure this person did say things that tripped up her progress at some point, but that wasn't to say that overall it was a bad thing.What's also interesting is that although the movie is about the aftermath of a rape and assault, director Esther Rots, who wrote the movie as well, has never been raped, and she also didn't really research the experience of rape victims. She said after the screening that she got three books on the subject, but didn't get past page one of book one because she wanted the movie to be real. So she basically imagined what it would be like if she had been raped by someone. You may think that wouldn't work, but apparently at the previous night's showing, there was a consultant psychologist in the audience and he said it was tremendously close to the real experience of raped women.I think that the production standards were very high as well, there were only five people making up the cast and crew of this film and they lived together whilst they were making it, they edited it and made the sound design on the go. Dan Geesin the guy who did the sound design did a great dob, it was done incredibly intricately. A lot of films you will see assault scenes done soundless, or with music over. He really really made everything as realistic as possible with his amazing dedication.So this is a really brave film because Esther Rots has based the character Marieke on herself. I've seen sometimes how women are distressed by extreme displays of testosterone-fuelled behaviour. Well there are oestrogenic attacks par excellence in this movie. I have never been able to deal with these. Even before the rape I would have found Marieke an impossible person to deal with, a kind of whirlwind of emotion and activity. So I think it's very brave that Esther put that all out there, as you can't often see "through the skin" of female characters in movies. Rifka Lodeizen, who has mainly been involved in TV work so far, was really acting the part so tremendously well, surprised no awards for her yet.