Review for "Kelly & Cal"

My most recent film review for Way Too Indie is on the oddball friendship film Kelly & Cal, which is a surprisingly dark, up to a point, story about refusing to change. Here is a sample:

"Kelly and Cal bond over their outsider statuses and the fact that they are kind of terrible people. It is easy to imagine pre-disability Cal as a jaded loner who believed himself to be better than everyone else. The accident has only given him a convenient excuse to gripe about how awful everyone is. Kelly also carries a holier-than-thou attitude that similarly borders on grating. Kelly & Cal’s real strength draws from how dark and weird it is willing to be. Like earlier 2014 indie release Adult World, Kelly & Cal finds unexpectedly offbeat and bleak notes within conventional narrative limitations. Unlike other “unlikely friendship” films, there is no whimsy or a sense of doomed beauty to the events on display. Up to a certain point, the film makes just about every character deeply unsympathetic and unlikable. Kelly is selfish and narcissistic, and her funk stems as much from arrested development as it does from postpartum depression. However, her husband is often an inattentive, emotionally unavailable asshole, and this makes Kelly’s bizarre relationship with Cal all the more plausible."

"The Lunchbox", Rom-Coms, and Expectations vs. Reality

The Lunchbox is a film about the gap between expectations and reality; between the way life is and how we wish life would be, and how the twains shall never meet.

The film begins with a daffy little romantic comedy premise: The Mumbai delivery service accidentally gives the lunch Ila (Nimrat Kaur) intended for her husband to another man Saajan Fernandes (Irrfan Khan).

Ila is having marital problems. Her husband is distant and cares more about his work than her. Ila had believed that if she could win her husband’s stomach than she could win his heart as well. 

Saajan loves her cooking so much that he eats every last morsel. Ila and Saajan soon begin exchanging notes, initially to clarify the mix up, and slowly they start offering deeper contemplations. The more they reveal in the exchanges, the clearer it becomes that they are both disappointed and unfulfilled by their respective lives.  

The anonymity of the messages offers an opportunity to state things one normally wouldn’t, a letter counterpart, in a way, to the walk and talks of Before Sunrise. The more the two invest in the meaning of these exchanges, the more they begin seeing it as an out to their humdrum lives. 

The film sets up a situation in which we desire to see them together, these two individuals who have create a beautiful bond. But the film is continually being tempered by reality. The film is not a Bollywood romance; it is a grounded neo-realist tale, flavored with the spark of a love affair. Writer-director Ritesh Batra keeps emphasizing the changing, modernized landscape of India. It is not a setting to be romanticized. Mumbai is bustling city, crowded and dirty. It’s beautiful for the docu-realistic lens Batra frames it through, noticing the humanity bubbling over in the setting. On more than one occasion, Batra pulls back to suggest that Ila and Saajan’s story is merely one small story amongst countless other stories taking place in India. 

Where a Hollywood film would find some way to bring these two individuals together, to grant them a little happiness and reprieve, The Lunchbox keeps finding complications. Running away together to Bhutan is hopelessly romantic, but it certainly isn’t practical. Missed opportunities and missed connections define the film. It doesn’t argue that this romance is impossible, but it allows its characters to take actions that undermine their dreams and satisfaction in the name of being realistic. 

And yet, the film is still deeply romantic. The brief window of time in which the exchanges take place is dreamy and exciting, and also raw and tender as secrets and regrets are revealed. The mid portion of the film is colored by a sunny, warm quality where the film indulges in low-key humor and a fluffy sense of possibility. Even as the film takes on an increasingly bittersweet tone, the possibility of consummating the romance is held out (the film’s ending is ambiguous on this account, even as it’s a doubtful ambiguity). While it may never occur, the way the conversation has affected and altered both carries through. Both take control of their lives and refuse to quietly be consumed by their grief, sadness and frustration. They have become better, more capable people who can now take charge of their lives. 

That somewhat oversimplifies the film’s aims, however. The characters’ journeys are about accepting that life is a little dissatisfying and difficult. It’s about learning to ground yourself within the life you have and not the one wish you had. That’s a little bit headier than the film’s seemingly commercial premise would immediately suggest, but it’s also richer and more rewarding. Saajan and Ila are real people struck by a moment of serendipity, not dictated by cosmic fate but a mishap of modern infrastructure. No matter what its causation though, it still remains serendipity and The Lunchbox remains a delight, a crowd pleaser that never simply settles for just being pleasant.

"Young & Beautiful", Voyeurism, and the Male Gaze

Young & Beautiful is a film fascinated with voyeurism; with people watching other people; with people looking at themselves; with us, as a viewer, watching these people gazing. In short, it is a film concerned with the male gaze.

The film begins with an unknown observer surreptitiously watching the titular young beauty Isabelle (Marine Vacth). On a beachside, she undresses to sunbathe. Director Francois Ozon uses the voyeurism to undercut the potential pleasure of the moment. We are seeing a nude body, but there is also something perverse and sinister due to the framing of the moment. We become self-conscious of our act of viewing. 

Throughout the film, there are many scenes where men will look upon Isabelle, but the power dynamic of the situations are consistently complicated by the way Ozon films these scenes. Ozon is constantly showing Isabelle returning the gaze of the males who wish to possess her, and, in turn, returning the gaze of us, the viewer. 

After a brief introductory sequence where Isabelle awkwardly loses her virginity to a German hunk (a situation which he controls and Isabelle is largely a passive participant in), the film spends most of its time to showing Isabelle’s involvement as a call girl. Ozon never explains where this desire stems from. Isabelle actions, instead, become ever more curious. She doesn’t seem to derive a whole lot of pleasure out of her encounters. Vacth portrays Isabelle with a tantalizingly blank expression (shades of Catherine Denueve in Belle de Jour). 

The pleasure that Isabelle gains seems to be in the power the sexual acts provide her. The money seems to give her little interest and the sex is often icky and degrading. But Isabelle enjoys the power over men this gives her (though she probably couldn’t quite ascertain and pinpoint this herself). She is in control. She is desired. She commands the “to-be-looked-at-ness” of her. 

Ozon plays to the to-be-looked-at-ness of his protagonist. Isabelle is well aware of her beauty. People note it with some frequency. She knows that people desire her and that this is an asset. The film starts with a shot where Isabelle has no control over the way she is looked at and it slowly moves towards her dominating the way she is viewed both within the narrative and by the camera. 

In the traditional analysis of the male gaze, the act of gazing was given acceptance because the men we do the vicarious gazing through were nice people, heroes. The majority of the gazers in Young & Beautiful, Isabelle’s clients, are the antithesis of the expected male gazers. They are old and not especially good-looking. They also are not charming or charismatic individuals. Put simply, they are casual assholes. They treat Isabelle crudely and misogynistically. They are dismissive and rude. We can’t identify with them, and our identification aligns ever more closely with Isabelle.  

Our awareness of our place as spectator causes us to judge the behavior of these men more harshly. We become more cognizant of the way these men objectify and sexualize Isabelle; and the way this sexism extends to more normal, traditional realms of Isabelle’s life. 

Midway through the film, Isabelle’s call girl activities are discovered. A client dies, and the police inform her family. Suddenly, everyone in Isabelle’s life is deeply self-aware and self-conscious of the power of Isabelle. They are hyper-mindful of the capacities of her young ingénue appearance. Soon every encounter with a male in her life becomes a charged moments, potentially freighted with meaning, read into or otherwise. 

There is a fair amount of meta-textual-ness taking place throughout the film. The film’s chief narrative pull comes from attempting to comprehend the enigmatic motives of Isabelle. But Ozon underlays this with a significant degree of subtext about the way we watch films. In a way, we are just as possessive of Isabelle as her clients. We are drawn to her beauty and possibly even desire her. It’s acceptable though, right? It’s solely within the context of a film. However, Ozon keeps challenging that notion by making the act of viewing a fraught experience with complicated responses to the actions on display.

"Veronica Mars" and the Fear of Being Vulnerable

**Spoilers for the First Season of Veronica Mars**  

(NOTE: I have not seen beyond the first season, and I'm interested to see how much of my assessment holds up going forward)

Veronica Mars, like most great shows, is about a lot of different things. It’s about race, class, and the way socio-economic status creates divisions within a town. It’s about family ties and the way we are defined by and reject the influence of our parents. It’s about the way people act out expected gender roles and masculinity and femininity. It’s about the hierarchies of social orders and the fluidity and instability of those divisions.  

Most obviously, it’s a show about the intricate murder mystery of a young female, Lily Kane (Amanda Seyfried), a popular girl who had a knack for causing and getting into trouble. Lily is a femme fatale, but her ability for the fatalism of that title is one of many subversions Veronica Mars brings to the film noir genre. 

But if I had to say what Veronica Mars is about at its core, it’s really a show about vulnerability. Moreover, it’s a series about the fear of being vulnerable. It’s about people posturing and pretending to be so much more than they are. Film noir is a genre with deeply damaged people trying to act like they’re above the shattered world around them. It features archetypes who are haunted by dark, complicated pasts they wish they could outrun. Veronica Mars plays to those archetypes, but it ultimately creates an emotional realism to them that transcends their genre origins. These are fragile, flesh-and-blood people who break on more than the philosophical, abstract level noirs can seem to exist in. (It ties that emotional wellspring to the volatile, complicated emotional lives of teenagers and high school as the incubator for those feelings)

At the center of the show is the titular character. Veronica (the excellent, perfectly casted Kristen Bell) begins the series dealing with the fallout of her father’s investigation into the murder of her best friend Lily. His insistence on pursuing Jake Kane, a software mogul who caused Neptune to reach an economic boom. This creates a rift between the Mars and much of the rest of the town. Keith Mars (Enrico Colantoni) loses his position as sheriff, and when Veronica sides with her father, she finds herself ostracized and ousted from the popular crowd. If this weren’t enough, in the aftermath, Veronica’s mother flees town. Another story dovetails with the murder investigation throughout the season; Veronica was drugged and raped at a party shortly after the murder. 

All of this has understandably hardened Veronica. Her choices in outfits are markedly different from her time with the cool kids, less girly and more reserved, for starters. But her whole personality has shifted as well. She’s steelier and more cynical. She hides behind sharp, sarcastic quips. Veronica is burying her feelings through conscious decisions. Veronica has become scared to experience what she’s feeling. She’s not sure she could handle it.

Stylized as the visuals of the show can get, in that moody, shadowy noir manner, they mask deeper emotions behind their surfaces. They also hint at a sense of darkness hiding behind the sunny California surfaces. Appearances matter in the world of the show. They mark status, privilege and wealth. Veronica Mars is a highly class conscious show. Veronica’s friend Eli "Weevil" Navarro (Francis Capra) is a Latino who comes from a working class background. His race and lower class standing garner him a lowered reputation -- while the community’s in-crowd is run by rich white kids. Weevil is forced to continually put up a front in order to survive the heated environment (yet, of course, he’s a nice guy at heart). 

But everyone is acting out a certain version of themselves to the outside world. This becomes most apparent in Logan Echolls (Jason Dohring, exceptionally magnetic in the role). Initial appearances would peg Logan as a supposed bad boy. But his outwardly faux-douchieness is a form of play-acting. Logan’s family life is troubled. His father is not only a serial adulterer but regularly beats his own son. Logan is also burying his emotions. 

Logan begins opening up in the wake of his mother committing suicide. Logan is desperate to believe that his mother’s death was staged, and he hires out Veronica to discover the truth. When her death turns out to be true, Logan, in a rare display of emotion, breaks down in front of Veronica. This is all the more peculiar for the displays of antagonism and distrust Logan has demonstrated towards Veronica up until this point. 

This proves to only be the start of Logan’s transformation. He soon shows unexpected shades to his personality, revealing a sensitive and noble side to Veronica. Late in the season, Veronica and Logan share a passionate kiss in the heat of the moment. It leads to deeper intimacy and eventually a relationship. Neither quite knows what they’ve gotten themselves into. They’ve stumbled into a relationship they describe as “illogical”, shared as it is with a supposed rival. 

Notice the way Dohring changes his voice, softer, lower, more cautious, in portraying Logan when he’s around Veronica. It’s the genuine article. It’s the voice one uses when they completely trust someone. In Veronica’s world, trust is hard to come by. As a budding gumshoe, she takes on cases where it is never entirely transparent as to who is responsible and who is trustworthy. The one defining element to their relationship going into the end game is how much Veronica can really trust Logan. She considers whether she is being used by him. Veronica is scared of letting people in. People have let her down too much – from her classmates and former friends to her flaky mother. Beyond this, her brittle demeanor comes from her experience of being raped. The show doesn’t extensively dwell on the incident, but it is clear that she has avoided romantic relationships (and relationships more broadly), in part, for this reason. 

Interestingly enough, the couple’s past relationships – Logan’s with Lily and Veronica’s with Lily’s brother Duncan (Teddy Dunn) – in hindsight, seem like their own form of playacting. As revealed in flashbacks, these relationships come off as stereotypical romances, clichés not of high school romances but something closer to a cheap teen comedy. They were rich, privileged kids doing what rich, privileged kids believe they are supposed to do, rather than what is necessarily most fulfilling. The charade of these relationships clarifies in the corrosive nature to Lily and Logan’s coupling. The two frequently were breaking up, and Lily was known to have a number of other boys on the side (in another bit of subversion, Logan is the faithful one). Logan and Veronica’s relationship which outwardly makes no supposed logical sense, is actually a healthier and better relationship for both than the seemingly sounder fairytale romances they previously held.

The Veronica-Logan relationship, at once, comes out of the blue. And yet, it feels like it was inevitable. There is an emotional validness to it that eclipses the messiness to the way the plot arrives at it. Its organicness derives from taking advantage of television’s long-term storytelling strengths. Slowly Veronica’s chipper demeanor and impeccable sleuthing peel away to reveal someone uncommonly damaged and who is sometimes not always right in her convictions. Logan initially comes off like an asshole, but by the end, he’s more akin to a lite anti-hero status. He’s a good person whose fundamental moral footing has gotten out of step. 

The last stretch of Veronica Mars’ first season dedicates a significant amount of time to their relationship. It’s easily the most charged portions of the season. It feels exciting because the show has been playing a long game, hinting at not only answers to its mysteries but deeper emotions as well. The show becomes ever more baroque as it heads towards its finale, and it begins relying more on a character-based, emotional emphasis over the more plot focused concerns of the earlier goings. Much of this stems from the writers’ carefully constructed plot which starts delivering payoffs with a wonderful precision in the homestretch. As the show starts revealing its hand, the emotional material takes front and center more and harmonizes with the plot mechanics ever more elegantly and satisfyingly. As the emotional underpinning become text rather than subtext, Veronica and her peers are allowed to expose more of their inner selves, disregarding social mores and betraying their own human frailty. 

Veronica Mars’ central narrative comes out of the death of a damaged person. Lily was never good enough in the eyes of her parents. She harbored a sadness that led to a self-destructive streak, and ultimately to her death. Her death opens up a crack in the carefully crafted facades of the Neptune community. In the process, of solving the murder case, Veronica allows herself to come to terms with the events that took place and to accept her complicated emotions towards what occurred. In other words, she allows herself to finally be vulnerable.

'It Felt Like Love''s Beautiful, All-Too-Real Take on Adolescent Female Sexuality

Gina Piersanti has one of those faces. It is a face that could be filmed for hours and you would never get tired of it. Piersanti films well, yes, but, moreover, she has an unusual, distinctive face. She is not a great beauty in the traditional sense. She is beautiful as we grow to know her (as some modest friend of yours might grow to be a knockout in your eyes as you begin to realize she’s far more interesting than half the dullards in your life).

Piersanti’s Lila in It Felt Like Love is like many of us in early adolescence. For many of us, there may be an uncomfortable recognition of our awkward past selves, possibly even more so for female viewers. The way director Eliza Hittman and director of photography Sean Porter shoot her, Piersanti always comes at the film’s material with naturalism and understatement. The events of the film feel like they’ve happened. They have unshakable aura of not just realism, but something that occasionally borders on vivid truth (or, put another way, there is an emotional fidelity to it as much as a faithful rendering of reality). 

It Felt Like Love’s subject is adolescent sexuality and that of a young female. Films and television shy away from this subject. Western society is so deeply puritanical and the United States is so repressed that we get squeamish at the thought of this. It must be doubly hard for a person like Lila. She is fourteen years old. She is smart and, more importantly, she is weird. She is different, with a mess of dark, bushy hair and a constant external humming of young insecurity. She owns her strangeness with a quiet defiance. But she still would like some boys to notice her and pine for her. Lila’s closest friend is Chiara (Giovanna Salimeni). Chiara has already had sex and goes through a steady rotation of boyfriends. This is the one area where Chiara is wiser and better versed. 

The difference between Lila and Chiara is like the difference between Laura and Claire in Eric Rohmer’s Claire’s Knee. At one point, in that film, it is remarked about how Claire is currently more beautiful than Laura, but how it is also easy to tell that Laura’s beauty will only grow and surpass Claire’s as she becomes older. All Claire has is her looks and the fact that she is young. The same can be said for Lila and Chiara. Chiara’s beauty is fleeting, and she is taking advantage of the gifts puberty has provided her. Meanwhile, Lila is drowning in puberty and the new found interests it has given her.

Lila is navigating a minefield. She has a strong fascination with sex. She goes out of her way to try to lose her virginity. She is out of her depth. Lila has not quite discerned the larger, complicated cultural and social views of women and sex. She doesn’t understand that there is so much more to sex than the act itself. And even the act of sex itself she doesn’t entirely comprehend. All she knows is that she wants it. Her friends are doing it, and she feels like she is getting left behind. 

Lila talks to her younger neighbor with a careless bragging bravado. Much of it is word-for-word repetition of what she has heard from older, more experienced individuals. She doesn’t get what it means. She feigns. This is the one time and place where she can reign supreme. It is the only time where her confidence and self-esteem can be raised, where she doesn’t have to feel uncomfortable, confused and uncertain. In a better world, she would stop pursuing much older guys who have no interest in her. She would date the age appropriate next door neighbor. They would simply make out and it would be enough. 

But the world wants Lila to grow up, and grow up faster than she can always handle. It is easy to imagine that a few years earlier that Lila’s awkwardness and gawkiness were fine. She was just a little kid and being a little frumpy and strange was acceptable. Now, she must be constantly hyper-aware of her body and the changes taking place to it. She must be deeply self-conscious of how people are looking at her and thinking about her. She has been asked to grow up faster than is possibly fair. 

It Felt Like Love has one of the best titles of any film released in 2014. The title beautifully captures the delicate, bittersweet poignancy of the film. It wonderfully sums up Lila’s complicated feelings and her journey throughout the film. When we are young, we assume our emotions and feelings have a purity and honesty. We believe them to be real and true. Life is constantly forcing us to readjust our beliefs and to recalibrate our emotions. Lila mistakes her budding sexual feelings for something deeper and more meaningful than they actually are. 

And yet, there is a resiliency to Lila. She has an inner strength to her. Piersanti’s performance is great because it invites us into Lila’s headspace. Piersanti reveals to us an inner life through posturing and small facial adjustments. Lila is vulnerable, but she doesn’t want anyone to pick up on that. Yet there is constant anxiety fluttering underneath. Even when she is willful and impulsive, there is a sickly sense of doubt and fear that bubbles under the surface. I want to see Piersanti appear in more. This is her first featured performance and she is remarkably assured. She is so well-matched with Hittman’s vision. It Felt Like Love’s vibrancy comes from Piersanti tapping into that all too familiar adolescent apprehension and laying it bare like an exposed nerve.

Review for "About Alex"

I recently wrote this Way Too Indie film review for the lightweight indie dramady About Alex, about old college friends getting hung up about the past. Here is an excerpt:

"As noted through casual meta-jokes, About Alex is essentially The Big Chill for a new era: a group of college friends spend a weekend together rehashing the past after one of their own attempts suicide. The meta-ness ends at the passing references to the film’s familiarity though (“This is like one of those ’80s movies,” one person says at one point). From there on out, About Alex falls into the traps associated with its subgenre. Jesse Zwick’s script (Zwick also directed) is laboriously constructed to the point where the summer home the gang goes to feels like it has more personality and well-worn history."

Why You Should Watch Teen Drama "Skins"

Skins, a British teen drama that aired from 2007 to 2013, seems, like many teen dramas, easy to write off.

Initially, anyway, that is. 

Skins is a strange series that was bred out of unique circumstances. The series was produced by E4, a companion channel launched by Channel 4 in hopes of attracting the profitable 15–35 demographic. For its first few years, E4 aired American programming that it had acquired syndication rights to. But by the mid 2000’s, E4 was looking to make a name for itself (If you’re trying to get a picture of this network’s brand, think edgy WB/CW). Skins, created by the father-and-son writers Bryan Elsley and Jamie Brittain, was the channel’s first stab at scripted original programming. With that came a certain degree of creative freedom, and that can be read in a lot of the series’ odd, distinctive, free-wheeling storytelling. This freedom soon became coupled with the fact that the series quickly proved itself to be E4’s most successful program, and it proceeded to grow into a British cultural phenomenon, drawing on the fervency of its young fan base and the coinciding rise of the internet to help cull fandoms. 

While it has since become influential in England, here in the states it has remained more of a cult favorite. This is something I wish to see remedied. The show uses its stories and its freedom in telling them to address subjects that are pressing and relevant, and yet it always packages this into something so raucous and lively, overflowing with unmistakable spirit and spunk. But underneath its silliness, whimsy, and flippancy lay something darker, bolder and often hugely affecting. All the sensational elements were merely a way to grab your attention in order for the series to deal with the things that it was truly concerned about. Conceptually, it is a series built as if the stoner class clown and the valedictorian feminist got together and made a show. Raunchy, vulgar contours sit comfortably side by side with thoughtful, pointed, emotionally florid, centers. 

The series’ concept starts off familiar enough: an ensemble piece that follows the lives of Bristol teenagers as they finish up their final two years of secondary education in sixth form (essentially high school). The first kink in that traditional design: Every two years a new generation of characters is introduced, allowing for new subjects and issues to be broached, and ensuring the series didn’t attempt contrived reasons for keeping characters around that would have no business of logically sticking about. The second kink: the series is primarily written by young writers who are actually the age of, or, at least, close to the age of, the main characters, writing their personal experiences and perspective into the series and helping make it more true to life.

These teens fall into love, and they fall out of it. They pine for people, some unattainably out of reach. They hook up. They have sex, lots of it. They drink and do drugs and throw parties -- it’s quite possibly the only thing they do more than obsess over sex. We observe their home and family lives, working and middle class and not always cushy. We observe them by themselves, alone with their thoughts and feelings, anxieties and insecurities. We observe them amongst peers. And when they’re not amongst their friends, who they like but also have the sneaking suspicion they might be better off without, they contemplate how bored and lonely and utterly lost they are. They believe in the singular uniqueness and tragic unfairness of their life. They are you. They are me. They are us in our late teens. It is painful and poignant how notably they remind us of ourselves. And just as things are getting too unbearably deep and jagged and raw, the show makes an absurd, juvenile joke to cut through the cloud of angst. 

That prior description encapsulates much of what I love about Skins, but, before I go overstating my adulation for the show, I must caution that wonderful as the series is, it is undeniably flawed. Good intentions can only go so far. Execution is what really counts, and it is here where I have to do a slight bit of walking on egg shells. I will be the first to admit that Skins is somewhat messy. It has a penchant for broad, silly, sometimes plain dumb, humor, and it too often gets caught up in relationship drama that doesn’t always ring true. The show also doesn’t have a strong handle on long-term plotting (outside of its excellent third season, easily its best) and occasionally it makes some rather outlandish or flat-out bad storytelling choices – most defensible, some not so much.

That said: Skins is a good, sometimes great, always singular series. And, at its best, the show nicely matches its pleasurable surface charms -- a playful, irreverent sense of humor, delectable romance, angsty drama – to some interesting, even under-examined, issues and topics. While a fair amount of defenses and praises of the series are guarded and likely to begin with some variant of “I’ll admit…” (look no further than to earlier in this post), for everything Skins gets wrong (more than I’d care to admit and sometimes breathtakingly so) it gets a dozen or more so genuinely and refreshingly right that it often erases away a lot of the potential ill-will its shortcomings create (As Flavorwire’s Judy Berman noted, “It’s hard to explain if you haven’t seen the cult British series … but Skins can somehow get away with things that would just seem cheesy and overwrought”. The elements that should clunk more often than not don’t because they aren’t a bug but a feature). These types of gauged defenses are slightly unfair though. They treat the series like it is a guilty pleasure. Besides the fact that guilt or self-flagellation over the things we like/enjoy, and in the process crafting a moral cultural hierarchy, is needless, pretentious, outmoded, helps no one, and adds little of critical value; we should also simply accept that the show when it was on its A-game was honestly just a pleasure, purely, simply and with little need for justification or qualification.    

The show’s distinctive ability to create admiration and amusement began with its unusual formatting. Skins is one of the most structurally audacious series of recent memory, which is both one of its greatest assets and something that lead to all sorts of weird storytelling issues. Each episode focuses on one, or in some instances multiple, characters. Essentially the show takes on the form of a collection of short stories with serial elements playing out in the background. Its odd structure was a boon to what was something the show was always good at: character and characterization. (Even at its worse, the show’s storytelling typically made sense on a character level even if on a plot level it could be eyebrow raising). 

The show’s structure opened it up to trying on new identities and personalities week-to-week and season-to-season. One week it could be a raucous comedy, the next a peculiar avant garde play, and yet another a quiet family drama. This meant that some episodes could reach brilliant, ecstatic highs – acting as fantastic examples of what this tv genre is capable of at its finest – and still others could crash and burn as fevered, frustrating blunders – sometimes these drastic tonal shifts existed from scene to scene leading to greatness and significant enjoyment buried even amongst the most misguided efforts (This was especially true in the third generation’s seasons, the most divisive and uneven, and the ones to have the lowest lows to counter the highs. The show was simply running out of steam by that point, but there is still some good and especially some very curious stuff there). Thankfully the counterweight typically balanced out more towards the good than the bad. Like other shows with outsized ambitions and that changed markedly episode to episode, such as Lost or Community, this made diving into each new installment of Skins thrilling to watch. You never knew quite what you were going to get (or whether it would be fully, successfully pulled off), but you knew it would look nothing like any other episode, and sometimes like nothing else on television.

Each episode starts from a place of: “Let’s hone in on this one character and dig into what makes them who they are, and why they matter”. It’s that last point that makes the show stand out; Skins is a deeply empathetic show and sympathetic towards and interested in people that films and television have never really had a good handle on. This begins with having an earnest, meaningful look at teens, but it extends to the writers’ choices in who those teens are – from people from rarely seen ethnic backgrounds and people from rarely depicted subcultures to individuals with atypical personalities and identities.

Skins was noted upon its release for its “authenticity”. Others were critical of it for its lack of realism. These differing opinions aren’t as hard to reconcile as it might sound. Skins, to an extent, is a soap opera or melodrama, and in the best tradition of that genre the series uses a heightened sense of emotion and dramatic storytelling – and, like the best melodramas, Skins’ underlying true interests are also unexpectedly incisive and provocative. 

This heightened, exaggerated sense of reality began with the show’s depiction of and attitude towards carnal pleasures. Skins was criticized for the excessive drug use, drinking and sexual escapades of its characters. “Teens do those things, sure,” enraged parents and introverted youths said, “but not to this ludicrous extent!” But critics missed the point. No one was depicting these aspects of young people’s lives – not really. Either you got something really, really earnest (which isn’t necessarily bad: just ask Switched at Birth) or something heavy on having a message (a la Degrassi -- that makes it sound worse than it is, but it’s very after school special-y). Yea, you have other series that feature these things in a non-preachy way, but those series often tend to glamorize it (your Gossip Girl’s and 90210’s) -- and their general sense of storytelling and character are too often odious. Skins, instead, just sort of matter-of-factly has it as atmosphere and minutiae, a meaningful part of the environment: teens do these things, so it makes sense that you would have them. (I’ve always seen Britain’s far greater tolerance of drinking – England has a massive, widely accepted drinking culture – and their always cheeky treatment of sex as having a big impact on this. It’s hard to imagine these depictions happening or working on American television. Something proven by an American remake of Skins failing due to extensive outcries – some claims went so far as to equate it with child pornography. The amorality just doesn’t fly over here).  

In particular, the most true to life element of this sticking point was the adolescent sexuality. Due to social prudishness and cultural denial, we don’t really consider the sexuality and sexual experiences of adolescents (especially young females, of whom Skins does a much better job of fully, seriously putting front and center than most media content). We couch sex in innuendo, suggestion and winking knowingness, but we exclude the actual messiness of its realities – which only serves to make it all the more confusing and complicated for those first discovering and learning about it. Skins is, by turns, sexy and tantalizing, but it has a real eye for the underlying messiness of sex and sexuality. The show finds its character having their first sexual encounters and their first real relationships, and the show takes time to portray what that entails, how simultaneously perplexing and thrilling those first discoveries and experiences can be (Plus, it's also one of the most sex positive shows, showing a variety of sexual experiences and refusing to criticize or pass judgement). In the world of Skins, romance is all consuming. Sometimes that could make love seem like an inescapable addiction – one of the more problematic underlying suggestions of the show and its obsession with one true pairings  -- but it also had a more logical gravitational pull, something viewed with a fervent, delirious attentiveness familiar to teens; a thing marked with signifiers of status, self-worth and identity. 

The implausibility of some of this party readiness (from “how the hell do they afford this” to “how are they not dead”) is intentional. The show isn’t supposed to always make literal sense. It trades in tactile authenticity for emotional authenticity. By placing us thoroughly in the perspective of these characters, we are meant to understand to a large extent this is a subjective presentation of events (This often makes a lot of the sillier, broader elements, such as the caricature-esque depiction of parents, a lot more forgivable and palatable than they might otherwise be). On one level, it’s faithful to the all-consuming emotional surplus of the age-group it depicts, with the associated self-involved drama in tow. 

Moreover, and more importantly, the show utilizes its heightened emotionality to create a more direct emotional connection with its characters. Perhaps the show’s greatest value and most admirable feat was its desire to take seriously its young characters. Characters on Skins can, and do, act awful and take some terrible, impulsive actions. But the show reserves judgment. The show’s interest lies in understanding motivations, aspirations, and desires. In other words, it aims to do nothing short of recognizing, identifying, and appreciating the complex inner emotional lives of its young characters. This is something frankly pop culture tends to avoid doing. The culture at large has infantilized our comprehension of what it means to be a young adult. We presume children and teens don’t have complicated, fascinating inner lives. Skins recognizes and understands that simply isn’t true.

Skins has a deft, intuitive sense for the psychology of its characters, and each installment asks us to consider some new character, sometimes someone the show has gone out of its way to make us dislike. That distaste may not necessarily go away but it needn’t for the intended effect to work. Skins doesn’t always beg for your sympathy (though it usually achieves it) but it does insist on your empathy – something too infrequently seen of tv series.

Some of this probably makes Skins seem more serious-minded and heady than it actually is. First and foremost, the show is interested in being entertaining and it’s largely very good at that. Skins places the “deep stuff” in between lots of amusing comical digressions – dramatically and emotionally dark as the show can get, it often plays more like a racy and lewd yet effervescent comedy -- and involving interpersonal drama. The ongoing drama makes for something that’s easy to get invested in, as it creates relationships (romantic, platonic, and familial), and complications for those relationships, that are absorbing and even a little resonant. 

The series is also progressive, transgressive, and subversive, and that makes it exciting, surprising and fascinating. While it features a number of the outward appearances of the average teen drama, and indulges occasionally in a few tropes, Skins is consistently smarter and deeper than its genre counterparts. 

For instance, the first generation’s ostensible central protagonist Tony (Nicholas Hoult) has all the outward appearance of the vacuous, pretty-boy nice guy lead, but he reveals himself to be a Human Monster, a manipulative sociopath. Tony’s disturbing behavior becomes a way into indirectly deconstructing all these wonderful issues of masculinity, privilege and the hierarchies of young social orders. Meanwhile, the wounded, bleeding heart of the first generation slowly proves itself to be such unexpected, winning presences like bottoming out pill popper Chris (Joseph Dempsie) and spacey head-case Cassie (Hannah Murray) (The show benefited tremendously from its stellar casting, which paired fantastically capable, largely untested, young actors – actually the age of their characters, for a change -- superbly well with particular characters that they then made their own). 

The second generation’s seasons -- for my money, even better than the already quite good first two seasons -- confidently doubled down, inviting us to look at a range of challenging and underserved issues, including depression, sexual identity, immigration, and autism (as well as the more familiar, but no less important, issues of race, class and gender). This made the show rather controversial, but the show’s treatment of this material demonstrated tact and sincere engagement. Throughout its run the show would tackle remarkable, difficult subjects, and often with relative insight and understanding. The show was perceptive and sincerely concerned about such rarely dealt with topics as living a religious life in a modern world, combatting and learning to live with mental health problems, and learning to accept and embrace having non-traditional sexual orientations and identities (The latter of which produced, in the third season, the show’s single best storyline: a beautiful, poignant tale of first love, played with achingly real vulnerability by Kathryn Prescott and Lily Loveless. This is, simply put, the best treatment of the discovery of sexual orientation I’ve ever seen, and it acted as a lovely center that spun outward to elevate everything around it, turning the third and good portions of the fourth season into exceptionally good television. I’m not sure what’s more admirable and impressive: that, to my mind, there has never been a lesbian story like this or that at the end of the day it’s just matter-of-factly a story of young love). Then there were the non-controversial stories still underwritten in media that Skins less brashly and more quietly depicted: female friendship, fundamental human decency, and the acceptance of the consequences of one’s actions.  

The series is highly evocative of a particular time and place. It is flavored by the distinctiveness of taking advantage of its setting in Bristol (It never feels generic or bland; it very much feels like its slice of life of a certain locale). But it also feels very much of its time; in a few years’ time, we may look back on the show as something of a time capsule of what it meant to be a teen in the early 2000’s. But Skins has a universality to the experiences it depicts that cuts across generations. The details may not be the same but the general evocation of that feeling of confusion, disaffection and ennui; of close but tenuous bonds; of heartache and heart-break; of loneliness and connection during that fleeting but defining point in our lives is unmistakably familiar. 

More than anything else that made Skins a good show was its generosity. Warmly, intimately, invitingly, the series kept its arm wide open to embrace its characters, to suggest that they mattered, and that if you were like anyone on the show you mattered too. But it rarely achieved this cloyingly. It would put its characters through hell and high water for some compelling drama, but it would usually only dangle them over the ledge so far. Its heart – so transparent under all that supposed edge and grit, and boundary pushing – was something it wore on its sleeve. It cared a heck of a lot, and it made us have a heck of a lot of fun doing it.

Sure, Skins is far from perfect, but, then again, whose teen years are?