Scars

Toronto International Film Festival Program Book
1997

Scars
James Herbert
USA, 1997
75 minutes
Black and White/35mm
Production Company: Cargo Cult Productions
Producer: James Herbert
Cinematographer: James Herbert
Editor: Mark Jordan
Sound: Mark Jordan, Catherine Cobb, Alberto Garcia
Principal Cast: Carter Davis, Alexandra Rosetti
Production: Cargo Cult Productions

A young man, slowly removing his clothes, tells the story of the scar, wrought by a skateboard accident, which spills down his belly. A young woman, also nude, encounters him on a mountain road in Tuscany. They trade stories about their scars—psychological, sexual and otherwise—in a variety of settings: at the roadside, in a train car, in a Greek temple, in various bedrooms. Fascinated by each other’s bodies, they mimic the Roman statuary in their midst by repositioning each other’s sleeping figures. Their relationship is at once immediate and immediately complicated by the depth of their revelations and their nakedness. Their various encounters reveal no traditional narrative structure, but director James Herbert chronicles instead a frighteningly recognizable cycle of intimacy, troubled by conflicting desires and confession. For all its precise (and beautifully rendered) formal cinematic language, Scars stands finally as an unusually thought-provoking and achingly familiar psycho-sexual journey.

Herbert’s career has pointed to this, his “first feature,” for some time. Known equally for his luminous, extensively re-photographed short subjects involving the formal nude—his John Five was shown at the Festival a few years ago—and his genre-breaking music videos for R.E.M. (“It’s the End of the World...” and “Low,” among many others), Herbert in Scars seamlessly combines the classical power of Renaissance locations with the visceral angst of youth in the thrall of sensual obsession.

Astonishingly, this combination also makes us rethink the power of the body itself. By connecting these clearly contemporary figures to the history of naked human forms, their bodies take on a much richer erotic tone than the predictable, narrow representations of the body we have come to expect from TV and the movies.

Scars, however, works equally well on a more basic level. The tales told by the couple and the tender interactions between them are extremely moving. (Much credit for this is due to the courageous performances of Carter Davis and Alexandra Rosetti.) These stories of violation, of bittersweet experiments leading to half-understood emotional places, express—especially against their literal nakedness—as honest a take on the vulnerability of youth as one can imagine.
—Noah Cowan