Dans Ma Peau

There seems to be something about French filmmakers that allows them to straddle the art/exploitation divide like few others. Whether it be Georges Franju with Eyes Without a Face, or more recent cause celebres such as Catherine Breillat with Romance and A Ma Soeur, Gaspar Noe with Carne, Seul Contre Tous and Irreversible, or even - surprise, surprise! - Claire Denis with Trouble Every Day, they seem to have a knack for tackling even the most lurid subjects with intelligence and seriousness.

Dans Ma Peau, the first feature from acclaimed short filmmaker and frequent Francois Ozon collaborator Marina de Van, is another case in point. It relates the story of a young woman, played by de Van herself, who finds fulfilment in self-mutilation.

One evening at a party, Esther, who has a committed boyfriend and whose career is starting to take off, accidentally cuts herself in the dark. Oddly, she doesn't notice until she sees the trail of blood when visiting the bathroom some time later and is understandably somewhat freaked out. The next day she visits the doctor, who wonders why she did not feel the injury at the time and so tests her nerves, which seem to be okay.

Later, after a stressful time at the office, she finds release by sneaking off to a storeroom and gouging into her leg with a chunk of metal. With her boyfriend Vincent (Laurent Lucas) and co-worker Sandrine (Lea Drucker) understandably shocked and concerned, she assures them it was a one-off.

But things soon spiral out of control. A business lunch sees Esther down glass after glass of wine, imagine her arm has detached itself from her body and excuse herself to go off and cut herself up. Another bout of self-mutilation sees her fake a car accident to cover the damage. She removes slivers of skin, savouring some and preserving others like trophies...

In terms of her command of filmmaking and committed performance, it's hard to fault de Van. Where the writer/director/actress fails, however, is to provide a really convincing insight into Esther's condition that's easily reconciled with real life.

Like Peter Greenaway's The Pillow Book, the film treats the body as text in a rarefied, somewhat credulity-straining manner. The way Esther initially responds to her accident is difficult to reconcile with her later self-destructive impulses - collapsing with shock hardly seems a moment of epiphany that would suggest a course of self-mutilation as the path to enlightenment. Elsewhere, the severed arm and use of split screens hint perhaps not only at Esther's growing detachment from herself - very Descartian mind/body and therefore French - but also her suffering from body dismorphic disorder, or suchlike, yet again one can only speculate.

All in all, a little less enigmatic subtext - is this a study in bodily reclaimation through modern primitive style practices? Foucauldian micro-politics of the corpus/body of power/knowledge? - and a little more overt editorialising - Esther needs help, period - might have been preferable for all the Angelina Jolie, or Elizabeth Wurtzel, wannabes out there.

Needless to say, Dans Ma Peau is a confrontational, challenging film that is not for everyone. At the press screening I attended - not an easily shocked audience, and one that had been forewarned about the film's content - there were several walk-outs.

Nevertheless, it could conceivably be worse. One shudders to think how the majority would respond to Japanese auteur Hisayasu Sato's thematically similar all-out gore film Naked Blood in which an experimental drug short circuits the nervous system and transforms painful sensations into intensely pleasurable ones, leading its unwitting users into an orgy of mutilation and autophagy that includes such memorable moments of disgust and depravity as an eye removed by a fork and a woman slicing off and eating her own vaginal lips...