The Skin I Live In: A film by Pedro Almodóvar
A friend read a review of Pedro Almodóvar’s new film and thought it sounded creepy. The blurb I read did not draw me in, but I saw The Skin I Live In anyway because it is by Almodóvar. After Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!, All about My Mother, Talk to Her, Bad Education, to name a few, Almodóvar is an auteur whose films we see because they are Almodóvar. His name should always come to mind when we think of the foremost filmmakers of our time.
The Skin I Live In is intellectually horrific, psychologically suspenseful, and a zany tale of vengeance and madness, in other words, vintage Almodóvar. Held captive on the palatial estate of an unhinged but gifted plastic surgeon (Antonio Banderas) is a beautiful woman (Elena Anaya) on whom he experiments to develop a synthetic skin for burn victims. The woman’s identity and how these circumstances came about are a mystery until a man in a tiger costume comes to the door and rings the bell. The tiger is Zeca the criminal, whose appearance precipitates flashbacks to a tragic sequence of events that began six years earlier.
English plastic surgeon Nigel Mercer says, “I take my hat off to Pedro Almodóvar: this film about a deranged plastic surgeon is absolutely brilliant. My wife was so disturbed after watching it that she started asking me some concerned questions about what my job actually involves.” (Laura Barnett, Another View on The Skin I Live In, The Guardian, 13 September 2011)
For Almodóvar no subject is taboo, no scenario too far-fetched. Themes of identity, sexual and otherwise, are familiar ground for Almodóvar; here they form a unifying thread. The film starts a little slowly, then unwinds quite nicely. The storyline is outrageous, and Almodóvar makes it work, with a denouement where the inevitability of a tragic justice is followed by a touching and unanticipated reunion.
David :: Dec.12.2011 :: House Red: Film :: No Comments »