Under the skin (open spoilers)

Cafe Society
1

Just finished watching this.

A good movie, aesthetically and narratively.

I am trying to make sense of it, still.

So, two things I want to discuss here: What happened in the movie and how the aesthetics are used.

What happened:
So, what do you think is going on in that movie?
My take is that the biker is a pimp, the woman is a prostitute who is forced into bringing men to an isolated place where the biker can kill them.

The biker could be an accomplice, though. It’s unlikely to be part of her personality because the biker is seen to be acting independently while she’s doing something else.
After she spares the disfigured man, she decides to quit/flee. She meets a man who helps her and they grow closer.

When the man who helps her tries to have sex with her, she seems concerned that her hymen has been broken which seems incongruous with someone with a history of prostitution or sexual abuse. I’m not sure what to make of that scene.

Then the woman goes off on her own, the firefighter (who may or may not be real, he’s certainly surreal), tries to rape her, she gets away. He catches up to her and then, it’s not clear. The alien bit seems to be psychological dissociation on her part while she’s getting raped. Then either he burns her to destroy the evidence or he symbolically burns her.

I don’t know how to interpret the last scene with the biker standing on a mountain. Wiki says that it means he never finds the woman.

Is there something important I’ve missed? How do you interpret the movie?

Aesthetics:
Would this be an expressionist movie?

What worked best aesthetically in that movie?

Anything that struck you?

2

She’s an alien. They’re food.

No, I haven’t seen the movie. But that is how it was advertised.

3

You might wish to. The idea that she’s an alien and they’re food is likely to be either a metaphor or a delusion/self-justification from the point of view of the main character.

4

There has been a thread on this movie already. As WordMan indicated, the movie is (very loosely) based on a book in which the woman and cyclist are literally aliens and luring men to their deaths so as to harvest them for human meat, which is considered a delicacy on their home planet.

Now, I think the sexual violence and prostitution angle is an interesting angle to view the movie through, but it’s hard to deny with the last scene that she is supposed to be an alien. It helps explain some of the other scenes as well, like her gagging on the cake and not being able to have sex (lacking the organs et al). I think you make a decent argument for interpreting it as a metaphor, but literally she IS an alien.