So, What Was The Point?

I agree with you whole heartedly. I just posted a message saying the same thing. I love weird movies, not retarded ones that are completely unclear of anything that goes on.

If I had to guess I'd say the point of the film was to make self-mutilation a metaphor for the less obvious destruction we all feel compelled to inflict upon ourselves via the foods we eat, drugs, bad relationships, etc. or perhaps the emphasis we put on our careers, as Esther seemed to get further along in the deep end the more her career advanced. Again, that would be if I had to guess and was forced to be so analytical. Myself, I was ultimately a little bored with the film and found it to be silly.

The need for control? Addiction? Having something that is yours and no one else's?

This is an important film, and it is about all of these things. Look at the main character's job--- analysis, point by point reporting, detail-oriented results, all data for someone else's venture. What is hers? What can she have, what can she document and say this is me--- where I was before and where I am now? Perhaps her mutilation is simply a way to pinpoint herself to a map, a way of staking territory, or discovering something new. Also, she has quite a bit of responsibility at her job, old and new. Her original wound was not at first felt, and seemed to happen apart from her. Also, when she awakes the one morning and her left arm is asleep, she later cuts the same arm at a dinner and then retreats to a hotel room to further her mutilation. People do not take on immediate, palpable responsibility for things they don't remember experiencing or feeling. I think this is what first gets her started down the road she eventually gets lost on. In her life, she has had control and responsibility, and the initial wound was accidental and she didn't even have bearings on her own pain. The pictures she takes later are almost to prove the acts she engages in actually happened. When she goes into her cutting binges, it's in the mode of someone who cannot hold back, someone who needs this, who is addicted or intoxicated by the unknowns, the variables. She lacks real time perspective, and her later inspecting of the wounds is her vehicle of getting the ground back under foot. I also think the film was a meditation on vanity. In the final scene, we see the character we have come to know, who is also the actress, writer, and director--- she is posing but vacant, beautiful but scarred--- we are not just looking at her, she is also looking at herself. In order to take artistic license and force image on an audience, you must be vain, but also honest, in love with the beauty of self, but also exposed and ugly. Self mutilation serves these purposes well. It's a completely self centered act, but also a liberating cry for help.

To me, the movie was simply a study on a woman's relationship with her body. Esther is a very cerebral person who gets little pleasure from her body and feels detached from it. Experiencing pain from a cut in her leg brings to the surface a feeling of lust for flesh, for her own flesh. The deeper she dives into this new-found source of pleasure, the more her everyday life feels empty and meaningless in comparison. Looking for meaning outside of her body becomes increasingly useless. In the very last shot of the movie, when she's back in the hotel room after a devastating mutilation spree, we are shown a extreme close-up of Esther, zooming out until we see most of her body, then back again to the extreme close-up, then the zoom out again, etc. Esther has recoiled and can't reach out anymore. She had been disconnected from her own flesh for too long, and her reaction was to dive back in, only too deep to find a way out again.

This movie moved me so much. It has changed the way I interact with my body. My situation isn't anything like Esther's, but the movie drove me to get back in touch with my body, my "vessel" if you will. It feels to me like Marina De Van sent out an alarm call, and I heard it.

How strange! Some people fail to see the message in some movies when it seems so clear to others. I blame Hollywood for hammering messages to their audience to avoid any critical thinking on their part and reinstate their conservative bourgeois values. It is just another form of cheap lobotomizing propanganda.So this e-mail(I am responding to) is simply not surprising. If you are a little bit knowledgeable in art and art history,life and practice thinking, simply recognizing meaning or absence of it becomes child's play.
The whole movie, there is a constant reference to "details" , yes, that word is constantly mentioned. How hard is it to see that that woman has a hard time (or odd time) relating to the sum of her parts? This movie could easily be called " pieces of me".....the whole society, our modern society being revealed through mechanically separated chickens, meat, consummerism....how women have this ability to hurt their body, because of not being able to relate to that "entity" men have constructed.....This movie has meanings jumping at you like spiders in the Temple of Doom..So, how can that be difficult to understand, unless one is self-absorbed in Hollywood "cheeze" like Troy, fastfood and ...crystal meth.
I hope I could clear things out for you.It is also never a good thing to be easily amused and entertained. It never was a proof of taste.
Nathalie

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Some very good analysis here and THAT is the point. To think. Hollweird has desensitized the American masses to critical THINKING, serving up instead a fluff, predictable, bland, mindless and politically correct palette of sh*tty movies.

A movie like "Dans ma peau" will find a very small audience in America, but, nonetheless, here we are! One point of the film's main character was that she didn't FEEL anything. She cuts herself and doesn't feel it. She didn't know why either. Topics of self-obsession, self-indulgence (literally, too) and also just pure selfishness are brought to the forefront.

Her boyfriend, he didn't feel anything either, and he wasn't LOOKING at her as a real person, but more like a business partner to advance his own status. He and she are both trapped in the materialistic, media driven world of yuppiehood and couplehood. They are NUMB. She cuts herself to FEEL something other than the media directed life everyone lives and which feelings are legitimate and others not.

The film is satire on the modern world. The filmmaker is focusing on self-indulgence and taking it to the limit, why we do the things we do, why we fall into boredom when we have every modern convenience, how people in relationships prefer sweet lies to uncomfortable truths and thereafter the ugle consequences of such pathology. We all, at many times in our lives, wished to shed our skin and start all over, but we're numb....and we like it.

Watch this movie twice. It's a little hard in some scenes but the message is driven home...with the point of a knife. Brilliant film.

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