Revisiting a Faustian pact
By Margaux Farran - Apr 24,2021 - Last updated at Apr 24,2021
Monica Bellucci and Yahya Mahayni (right) in ‘The Man Who Sold His Skin’ (Photo courtesy of imdb.com)
The Devil, the gentleman in search of his lost princess, dark humour and a transcendent moral at the end are all found in “The Man Who Sold His Skin” that gathers all the necessary ingredients for a fantastic modern fable, that aims to denounce the commodification of human beings and the hypocrisy of the art world.
And this recipe seems to be working; the movie is the first Tunisian production to be nominated at the 2021 Academy Awards, in the Best International Feature Film.
Revisiting a Faustian pact
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Review: The indelibility of tattoos doesn t transfer to The Man Who Sold His Skin Robert Abele © (Tanit Films/Samuel Goldwyn Films) Monica Bellucci and Yahya Mahayni in the movie The Man Who Sold His Skin. (Tanit Films/Samuel Goldwyn Films)
A fascinating true story mixing art and human rights has inspired a regrettably ham-fisted movie in “The Man Who Sold His Skin,” Tunisian filmmaker Kaouther Ben Hania’s lush but wildly uneven yarn (and Oscar nominee for international feature) about the thorny convergence of art world privilege and real-world woes.
In the late 2000s, a Swiss man agreed to let Belgian artist Wim Delvoye turn his back into a tattooed work (titled after him, “Tim”), a contract that involved traveling for scheduled gallery appearances and a percentage when it sold (and it did). Ben Hania’s topical reworking of this eccentric and questionable bargain is to make the living canvas someone truly in need and who is more desperate t
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A great premise can be both a blessing and a curse. Consider
The Man Who Sold His Skin, a Tunisian film recently nominated for Best International Feature at the upcoming Oscars. It’s about a Syrian refugee who agrees to rent his body to a prominent European artist, who tattoos creative designs on his back and puts him on display in a museum. It’s a wildly original concept, rippling with political, artistic, and moral complexities, but it somehow adds up to less than the sum of its parts. It’s an idea so good that the film itself can
Bob Strauss April 7, 2021Updated: April 9, 2021, 7:15 am
Koen De Bouw and Yahya Mahayni in “The Man Who Sold His Skin.” Photo: Tanit Films
“The Man Who Sold His Skin” is the first Tunisian production ever nominated for the international feature film Academy Award and boy, does it fit the category. It’s also undeniably, sometimes radically, an art film, which is not always the case with multilingual Oscar contenders.
Directed by Tunisia’s Kaouther Ben Hania (“Beauty and the Dogs”), this rather tall tale charts the maddening misadventures of Syrian refugee Sam Ali (Yahya Mahayni in a demanding, accomplished feature debut) from the war-torn Middle East through the finest hotels and galleries of Europe. With a Schengen visa, the travel document he couldn’t obtain as a mere human being, tattooed on his back, Sam becomes a valuable and (mostly) welcome art object without borders.
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