No Skin Off My Ass

Bruce La Bruce is a bad boy Canadian filmmaker who uses his queer sensibilities (some would say obsessions) in every movie he makes. In this film he's fallen for a cute skin head and obsessed with the whole skinhead movement as well as having an obsession with body piercing.

As obvious as it is that this was made on a painfully small budget, the film is strangely interesting from beginning to end. Why is it that this film holds the attention with very little plot when so many other indie films scream film school and put the viewer to sleep?

If you aren't offended by the whole gay milieu and don't mind seeing a bit of graphic fellatio in a movie then you might find this interesting. Klaus von Buecker plays the cute skinhead and is very easy to watch. (No more so than Tony Ward in La Bruce's later Hustler White) It's rawer and grainier than his later Hustler White but interesting in much the same way.

What happens when a hairdresser gets obsessed with a skinhead? The very notion of his work is mocked by a style that requires no hair. And what does the hairdresser want from him? Is it simple companionship, sexual intercourse or something else, something much more difficult to obtain? Bruce La Bruce relies heavily on images to tell a story that focuses mainly on undefined desire. Through constant narrative disruptions and a somehow erratic storytelling, the meaning of "No Skin off my Ass" becomes diffused and blurry. Perhaps, it's La Bruce's postmodernist approach to cinematography and thus a story devoid of meaning is appropriate for our times. Perhaps, as literary critic Roland Barthes would have demanded, meaning can only be found in the readers or spectators. Every one has to work with the elements presented in the film to build their own story, the meaning does not come from the creator but from the interpreter, from the viewer.

There are, however, certain themes that are exploited since the beginning. Fetishism is one of them. The obsession of the hairdresser towards skinheads comes from the clothes they wear and especially their boots. Footwear has always been one of the main fetishes in classic psychoanalytic theory. Freud, for example, used to say that all women desired the man's penis (he was no feminist, of course). A woman was somehow incomplete because of the lack of penis. Other authors have stated that foot fetishism starts at a very early age: A child, any child, is playing in the floor and raises his head to look at his mother, looking through the mother's skirt, he realizes she does not have a penis, and therefore she is incomplete. And the young boy suffers as he stumbles upon this discovery. And he suffers so much for it that he wishes to fill that void, to replace that lack of penis with something else, hence he looks down to the floor again and he stares at her mother's shoes, and unconsciously he turns those shoes into the penis, thus replacing the absence with something else. The shoes could be seen as a symbolic penis; Lacan, for example, would later re-elaborate the theory explaining that the high heel shoes function as the mother's phallus, a phallus which has been previously denied by the father.

It would be interesting, however, to contrast these definitions with homosexual desire. What are shoes for a gay man? Are they necessary the mother's lost phallus? There is a very erotic fixation on the skinhead boots, and as the film progresses we understand that fetishism can take many forms.

Another interesting character is the skinhead's sister. She plans to make a movie about women, much in the same way that Luce Irigaray envisions feminist literature in "Speculum of the Other Woman". It's all about bodies, whether the female body trying to attain a certain supremacy or independency, or the male body removing itself from the classic Lacanian masculine position.

Although the exploration of the body is very valuable, there are moments in which there is no pathos, moments that one as a spectator would deem necessary. The ending is not as subversive as the rest of the film, perhaps it's too conclusive in a story that should have been left open and free to be interpreted and reinterpreted by the viewers. The meaning of text, after all, as Barthes would have wanted, does not depend on the author but on the reader. And in Bruce La Bruce's production this task falls heavily on the spectator.

Unfortunately the merits of this curiousity are outweighed by it's faults. Most notably the excessively grainy black and white photography and the interminably dull scenes of body-piercing. The director may have been trying to shock, but the result is just boring and annoying. Although this film is as graphic as any hard-core pornography, it is also very un-sexy. The scenes are merely graphic for the sake of being graphic. Finally the flaccid performance of Mr. LaBruce leaves a great deal to be desired. The supporting cast is more interesting to look at (all the dialogue is badly over-dubbed). Still and all, it is an interesting experiment and worth seeing at least once.

"Raspberry Reich" was very much advertised upon international film festival and packed viewing venues in full with folks from different preferential walks of life.

Dynamism and rough context left no viewer indifferent and understandably stipulated further curiosity to Labruce's movies.

Hopefully, "No skin off my ass" was a very good exercise on a way to "White Hustle" and above mentioned "Raspberry Reich".

The following text is just for fulfilling IMDb request on a minimum of a ten line text to be submitted: one two three four five six.

Thank you for considering my opinion.

I read someone saying The Dreamers was not just about showing people naked and this was, whoever wrote this is a complete idiot. The Dreamers was a terrible film, a sad fantasy of an aging man that used to be a great director, it was insulting to the sixties revolution, the sexual revolution and a film that over explained everything assuming spectators are stupid and furthermore and insult to the French. The dreamers is a horrible commercial film for hypocritical people who are scared and ashamed of their sexual desires. But it was a great idea to compare the two films, just because No Skin off My Ass has the same themes than the Dreamers but didn't fail at what it was all about : ideology, cinema, desire, redemption, being lost and love.

No Skin Off My Ass on the other hand is the equivalent of a punk fanzine, it's highly political, has a subtle subtext and contrarily to The dreamers is completely embracing it's time : the nineties. A period of time where people were terrified of skin heads, was battling against the aids during the aids holocaust and believed grunge punk rock could save the world. It's got style and great aesthetics, and despite being cheap it's unashamedly pure cinema : the inside swimming pool, basically a flooded flat, it's fetishist, licking doc martens to the sound of Nico's rendition of the German national anthem. There's lots of references to ancient cinema, visually, Lubitsch, Pabst and Von Stroheim while sharing those directors themes of predilection.