Film: The Man Who Sold His Skin
Starring: Yahya Mahayni, Dea Liane, Koen De Bouw
Director: Kaouther Ben Hania
Rating: ***1/2
Reviewer: George Sylex
Overview - Written and directed by Kaouther Ben Hania, The Man Who Sold His Skin melds two apparently unique universes. It joins the quick moving and extravagant business of contemporary workmanship with the quickly changing and similarly devastated world of evacuees.
Sam Ali (Yahya Mahayni) is madly in love with with Abeer (Dea Liane), a young lady from a higher social class who is pretty and strong and whom the film doesn't give a very remarkable character. Nonetheless, on a train, Sam's spur of the moment comment to Abeer about an upset draws in threatening consideration from the authorities, and he needs to leave Syria quick or face prison time. His lone expectation is to rejoin with his real love, presently vivacious away to Belgium by her folks and wedded to another, more extravagant man. A year passes. Abeer has hitched Ziad and moved to Brussels. Sam is working in a poultry plant, living in a condo with a flat mate (played by Jan Dahdoh), and sneaking into fancy gatherings at neighborhood art displays with the expectation of complimentary food. At one of those soirees, Sam is spotted by Soraya (Monica Bellucci), the individual collaborator of a well known and questionable craftsman. Jeffrey (Koen De Bouw), the craftsman, has another work as a top priority, and Sam will be the ideal campaign, medium, and subject of the piece.
Ben Hania starts The Man Who Sold His Skin by uncovering Jeffrey's workmanship, which — in a scene aligned to uplift interest from the beginning — isn't appended to Sam. After then enumerating why Sam left both Abeer and Syria, the film cautiously works its way back to that initial second. This is an energetic, examining, at times specifically overstuffed riddle, and furthermore a wild ride. From ecstatic decrees of adoration on jam-packed trains and woozy arcade dance scenes to over and again piercing the craftsmanship world's snootiness, the film is never short on important minutes.
The Man Who Sold His Skin never dismisses the disparaging idea of Sam's circumstance. He's likewise often outlined inside entryways and seen behind windows and reflected in mirrors, subsequently highlighting our connection to him as another sort of craftsmanship object: an anecdotal film hero whose excursion welcomes us to ponder our previously established inclinations of the outcast emergency and how certain types of charity for the benefit of settlers and exiles are inalienably shady.
The Man Who Sold His Skin is less intense in its critique when zeroing in on its focal romantic tale, which depends on a couple of an excessive number of fortuitous events to produce a lot of poignancy. However, for every one of its defects, Ben Hania's film tracks down some charming new roads to investigate the dehumanization of displaced people and the results of imaginative commodification, and does as such in manners that are similarly as frequently however clever as they seem to be agitating.
Final Word - The Man Who Sold His Skin may not be totally acceptable, however its numerous incredible similitudes for different social ills make their own, shriveling truth. It weaves together satire and sympathetic political attention to make a unique tale about workmanship, advantage, opportunity and character.
A Lively and Quirky Satire!
