With festival season fast approaching, undoubtedly one of our most anticipated films is “Under The Skin.” The long-in-the-works project, an adaptation of a novel by Michel Faber (“The Crimson Petal and White“), marks the return to feature filmmaking by commercials/promo wizard Jonathan Glazer, who made a storming debut with the excellent “Sexy Beast,” and followed it up with the even better, much undervalued “Birth.”
It’s been nine years since the latter, but in a few weeks, “Under The Skin” will debut at the Venice Film Festival. An offbeat sci-fi film starring Scarlett Johannson, who plays a cannibalistic alien seductress looking for prey in Scotland, it’s been kept mostly under wraps. Now, with the premiere approaching and the movie being added to the TIFF line-up, more details are starting to emerge, and some terrific news has arrived from the latter’s website about the film’s soundtrack, which will be provided by Mica Levy.
The 26-year-old Levy is best known, in certain circles, as Micachu, the frontwoman of lo-fi experimental UK pop band Micachu And The Shapes, whose 2009 record Jewellery was one of the best debut records of the last few years, combining dischordant pop with home-made instruments and electronic production. Two further albums and all kinds of additional projects have followed, with the last album Never being released a year ago. Micachu was a DJ on London’s grime scene, and is also a classically trained musician who trained at the Guildhall school and had an orchestral piece performed by the Royal Philarmonic Orchestra in 2008. She also teamed with the London Sinfonietta for their second album (see the mini documentary below).
She’s a compelling choice to score a film that should be equally fascinating, and we’re dying to hear what this sounds like, particularly as the score for Glazer’s “Birth,” by Alexandre Desplat, was one of the finest of the last decade. We’ll be finding out how it sounds, and how the film turns out, when it premieres at the Venice Film Festival on Tuesday September 3rd; check back then for our verdict.