Dans Ma Peau (In My Skin)
Marina de Van, Raindance Film Festival 2003

Emilie Bickerton

Body fetishisation gets autophagous in a new French film about self-harm.

This graphic portrait of a woman's relationship with her own body is both repellent and captivating. Dans Ma Peau is the first feature film directed by Marina de Van, also the film's screenwriter and leading actress. Esther (de Van) is a successful thirtysomething on the verge of promotion. Her private life seems a happy one, and there is talk of moving into a new flat with her boyfriend, Vincent (Laurent Lucas).

It is an accident at a party - where Esther seriously cuts her leg in the garden - which seems to destabilise her, as she notices, perhaps a half hour later, the blood trail she is leaving on the carpet. Until then, Esther felt no pain and only the external evidence of blood makes her aware of her gruesome injury. Like the dead arm you find by your side in the morning, Esther experiences her body as something disassociated from herself, something disconnected.

The self-harm which ensues could, in this light, be understood as what Slavoj Zizek has called 'a radical attempt to (re)gain a hold on reality… against the unbearable anxiety of perceiving oneself as non-existent' (Welcome to the Desert of the Real, 2002:10). Zizek has understood 'cutters' as a recent phenomenon running parallel to the virtualisation of our environment, 'a desperate strategy to return to the Real of the body'. This explanation would be plausible except that there are no broader links to 'virtualisation' in the film.

The commentaries de Van seems to be making are philosophically grounded, related to our relationship with the body, not as a site to express social discontent, but at the very source of the reasons for self-harm. What are the consequences, she is asking, when your body becomes, even for yourself, purely an object?

More conventional explanations of self-harm briefly surface. Esther tells a friend at work how suffocated she feels, she 'can't breathe' after long hours staring at the computer screen. This exchange follows her cutting-open the stitches on her leg with stationery equipment in the office storeroom. The act here seems one of release, the transgression of routine. Later, as her wounds become more apparent, an exasperated Vincent asks, 'Don't you like your body?'. Predictable he may be, but Esther's response, 'no, no, it's nice', is, it seems, entirely honest.

De Van is not interested in a portrait of self-harm as teen angst (her protagonist is over thirty), 'cutting' understood as a symptom of low self esteem, or emotional turmoil. Esther, it is implied, has a history of self-harm, and her reasons are more than circumstantial.

Explanations rest more with the consequences of objectification of the body which can lead to fetishisation: a desire for the flesh - even one's own - such as Esther develops following the experience of her body disassociated from herself. The blood on the floor marked her injury, not any internal pain, and consequently her body could be objectified.

At a restaurant she is unable to concentrate on her colleagues' discussions, so distracted is she by the carnivorous activities around her: knives slice through steaks, chicken wings are stripped of flesh, forks are stabbed into succulent duck. In a moment of surrealism, Esther sees her left arm detached from her elbow, and as flesh is devoured all around her, the vision of this lone arm is assimilated by the steaks and drumsticks. Desperately Esther prods at the arm with her own fork as though it were a naughty, unruly limb trying to free itself from her body.

The fetishisation is indicated by the way the story unravels much like a torrid love affair. Esther must lie to others, the scenes of self-devourment are reminiscent of stealing away with a lover, as she creeps into the storeroom, or secretly checks into a hotel. Of course, the 'Thing-in-itself' remains elusive. Consummation is impossible, and a sexual desire for penetration becomes more and more acute.

Events are graphically portrayed, and the animalistic visions of de Van devouring her own flesh are sickening. However, what redeems the repellent scenes is de Van's extraordinarily human performance. As she stares hopelessly into the void, it is clear how traumatised and confused she is by her own actions. She is self-aware enough to realise their horror, and at moments of normality (at a cash point, in a pharmacy) she has haunting flashes of recollection which clearly disturb her. Most affecting perhaps is the compassion for her body; she really does 'like it', preserving the pieces she removes, rather pathetically in toilet paper (as you would keep milk teeth).

Internal disunity is explored and eventually deplored for the isolation it necessarily brings. Perhaps the most horrifying image is that of Esther locked in an infatuated embrace with herself in a hotel room - the act of love, only possible with two people, is conducted in blood and solitude. The photographs of her final acts are possibly a further product of fetishisation, or, potentially the attempt to save herself by creating evidence of her destruction.