The Skin of the Teeth: gay tricking down the rabbit hole

REVIEW by Drew Rowsome

8 May 2019

I'm not sure you can seduce someone you've already fucked

By now we've all seen so many tense interrogation scenes in police procedures, that upending the form and giving it a healthy further dose of homoeroticism sounds like fun. As the The Skin of the Teeth promo material claims, like a "David Lynch directed episode of Law & Order: SVU." In many ways - striking visuals, haunting images, dreamlike imagery - that is an accurate assessment. But The Skin of the Teeth also suffers from that Lynchian lack of resolution and an excess of ambiguity.

The Skin of the Teeth starts strongly with a man, Donal Brophy, arriving home to his stylish loft. As ominous electronic music hums in the low end of the background, he showers, shaves and prepares dinner, including lingering shots of chopping meat to be dropped in a sizzling pan. It turns out the dinner if for a date and Pascal Arquimedes, younger and of a lower social class, arrives carrying a bottle of cheap wine. They have apparently had sex before but of the anonymous variety and Arquimedes has gaps in his memory of the encounter.

The two flirt awkwardly, Brophy determinedly mysterious, Arquimedes very nervous. There is a wonderful scene where Arquimedes looks through a telescope that is trained on an apartment across the street. There a handsome blond man (who we never see) is seducing his trick of the evening. Apparently Brophy and the blond get their kicks watching each other's action. Arquimedes is into it and he and Brophy dance, and for a moment The Skin of the Teeth appears to be steaming up voyeuristically, a gay Rear Window. 

But Arquimedes has searched Brophy's medicine cabinet, asks about drug use, and finds some pills in a box in the bedroom. He takes a pill and begins to zone out. The dance gets frenzied and ends in disaster. We next see Arquimedes in a holding cell, seated at a metal table. Then things get weird.

Going with the flow of The Skin of the Teeth offers some pleasures - Tom Rizzuto's boxer short-clad cop, Chuja Seo flossing her teeth enigmatically, David Cruz as the hot con who knows the ropes but won't share more than a cigarette and lots of lingering glances - but just as many inexplicable symbols and metaphors. It is impossible not to parse for meaning and wonder how it will all resolve. After all, police procedurals always do.

Writer/director Matthew Wollin is more interested in the dreamlike, or drug-induced, atmosphere than a plot or explanations. The ending does go for a Twilight Zone-esque finale but it is a reach and so ambiguous that it doesn't really satisfy. There is lots of room for interpretation and The Skin of the Teeth does evoke themes of class warfare, systematic racism, sexual roles, drug abuse, misogyny and the horrors of fox hunting, but mostly it just offers puzzles and elusive images. 

Fortunately Arquimedes is very expressive and watchable. And his performance, as are the rest, is grounded in a reality that makes sense to the actors making it all the more mysterious for the viewer. Post-McArthur the opening sequence makes the skin crawl more than intended and in a fentanyl world, popping unknown pills seems unwise, but if one loosens one's need for reality or jump scares, The Skin of the Teeth is an intriguing exercise in Kafka-esque gayness. The Skin of the Teeth seduces but your desire for dating or tricking may be fucked.