Simply Perfect

Exactly the movie you think it is, but not the movie you want it to be.

It's the kind of movie you'll want to see a second time with someone who hasn't seen it yet, to remember what it was like to watch it for the first time.

The story, direction, characters, and writing/dialogue is akin to taking a tranquilizer shot to the neck, but everything else was so well done.

Skin is a movie about the difficulties of life after the experience of a concentration camp and is set in the Netherlands in 1979. Robert de Hoog (brilliantly) plays Frankie, the son of a holocaust survivor; a man who struggles to leave his war experiences behind and begin to live a normal life. In being like this, he begins to frustrate Frankie, who slowly becomes more and more distant from his father as the movie progresses. Their lives are turned upside down by the hospitalisation and eventual death of Frankie's mother, who held the family together. Seeking solace, Frankie joins a group of Neo-Nazis, an action that causes his social life to break down. The film shows Frankie's slow demise very cleverly with analeptic shots of Frankie's life before he was incarcerated, as the film switches between past and present. All in all, this is an excellent film and one I would recommend to anyone who wants to learn how badly the holocaust can affect a person's life, and to see how families can be torn apart by a teenager's desire to be accepted.

Skin follows the story of Frankie, a teenaged Dutch boy living in 1979 during the punk revolution. The story cuts between two different time periods; before and after he is sent to prison. Before his sentence, we are shown his strained relationship with his father, a Jewish concentration camp survivor, and his mother's fight with cancer. These family struggles make it easy to see why Frankie is as rebellious as he is. Throughout these scenes, we see Frankie become increasingly worse, ending up getting involved with a gang of neo-Nazis. His troubles are clear to the audience, when he allows the gang to give him a swastika tattoo on his chest, despite the fact that his father was part of a Nazi concentration camp. Robert de Hoog plays Frankie brilliantly, resulting in a nomination for an International Emmy Award for Best Actor, and winning the award for Best Actor at the Netherlands Film Festival. His winning performance allowed the audience to fully believe Frankie's story.Skin is a hard-hitting, strong story about youth rebellion, and how it can escalate from one extreme to the next, with lack of support and attention from friends and family. Frankie's Jewish roots make it harder to believe what he has become, making the story more gripping to watch.

An intelligent and highly believable study of violence's seeds and some of the elements which can help these seeds germinate. A study that allows us a place within the main character's mind, throughout his sad journey. The fact of the matter is that generally, physical violence is an inherent need pertaining to most kids. Doubly so boys. Triply so boys whose families are disintegrating. Discipline/reality-checks, help this need subside. Without this, the need only grows. It is a very difficult thing for us to deal with in healthy ways. Especially at an age when our brains (the only tools that can help us deal) are undergoing so much literal reconstruction. When this need is ignored, the results are often both painful and permanent. Moral of the story? Worst case scenario, kid's got a temper, spending time together isn't working, don't know what to do - enroll him into a good MMA school. Or Jiu Jitsu or Karate, anything really. Anything that provides him a safe way to channel this pent up need on one hand and yet also provides controlled reality-checks and discipline on the other hand. It isn't the perfect solution, but often, it is by far the lesser of all the evils at hand.

'Skin', set in a grim Dutch working class area in 1979, tells the story of Frankie, who starts out as a normal, somewhat rebellious teenager, and ends up as a neo-Nazi in jail. His Jewish father, a concentration camp survivor, is unable to communicate with his wife and son, which frustrates Frankie and has already created a clearly uneasy father-son relationship at the beginning of the film. When Frankie's mother gets seriously ill and needs to be hospitalized, all frustrations come creeping out from under Frankie's skin and a rough process in which he alienates from his father and most of his friends is set in motion. Even though Frankie does not intend for it to happen, he gradually finds some solace with a group of skinhead neo-Nazis, and escalation ensues.There are some parallels between this film and the classic 'American History X', but whereas that film shows us how a remorseful neo-Nazi seeks redemption, this one explores how exactly a young person who would seem an unlikely candidate for adopting such views ends up doing so for all the wrong reasons (if there even are any right ones to begin with). Moreover, 'Skin' is a strong, gripping story about what may happen when communication fails, set against a background of growing intolerance and violence.