Metal Skin

After some years, I finally managed to obtain a copy of Metal Skin on VHS, and was fortunate enough to be able to watch this film for a second time last night. I found that Writer/Director Geoffrey Wright's dirty realist tale of desperate, frustrated desires and car crash emotions realised through the lives of four Melbourne youths is as fresh on the second viewing as the first.

Metal Skin's plot is launched by protagonist, Joe (Aden Young), a working class car enthusiast who lives with his mentally ill father in a house turned to squalor. When after four years of unemployment Joe receives a job placement at a grocery wholesaler, he manages to escape the drunken tirades of his father and fall in love with the beautiful yet distant Roslyn (Nadine Garner), who just happens to be the long time girlfriend of his work mate, Dazey (Ben Mendelsohn).

Joe soon finds out that Dazey is quite the philanderer, but as both young men are serious fast car enthusiasts, initially takes Joe under his wing down at the city's illegal race yards in an effort to keep his infidelities quiet. Meanwhile, Dazey's girlfriend, Roslyn looms in the distance, dragging with her through every frame a painful shared history with Dazey that the audience can only guess at.

Meanwhile back at the grocery store, Pagan princess, Savina (Tara Morice) falls in love with Dazey and plants her spells in an effort to compell Lucifer to make Dazey love her. Joe mistakenly believes that Savina's attentions are directed towards himself, and all of this angst sets an explosive set of events into course.

Shot predominantly on location in Melbourne, Australia, Metal Skin is a character driven film which well depicts the kind of oblivion that can be sought out by those with neither direction nor hope in their lives. This film's characters are clearly the marginalised by-products of the socially atomised world that neoliberalism has created. Tipped out of their working class adolescence into a tenuous adulthood with little to offer them, Metal Skin's characters claw at one another for the slightest hint of affection, or even a semblance of it.

Metal Skin provides a dynamic snap shot of a surprisingly vulnerable group of people at the end of their tether, and for all of its darkness, it is an essentially humane film which is not without its insights into the human condition. This is most evident in one of the key scenes of the film, in which Wright illustrates to us the natural ability that people in pain have to intuitively realise pain in others.

Metal Skin is Geoffrey Wright's second major feature film, and I truly doubt that Russell Crowe would have come as far as he has in mainstream cinema if it wasn't for Geoffrey Wright's superb direction of him in Romper Stomper. Geoffrey Wright garners no lesser performances from the actors in Metal Skin; and should the opportunity to see this film arise, I recommend it.

Vanessa Long

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