The Skin I Live In (La Piel Que Habito) | Review

Rejoice in the fact that one of world cinema’s great artists is doing anything but resting on his laurels: Pedro Almodovar’s giddily unclassifiable The Skin I Live In might be the most challenging and unsettling movie of the Spanish auteur’s career, while still maintaining his usual unabashed humor and novelistic nuance. Grimm’s fairy tale archetypes — a beautiful princess locked away in a tower, a mysterious traveler in disguise, magical shape shifting — are refracted through classic Hollywood’s mad scientist horror genre, with echoes of everything from William Wyler’s ‘The Collector’ to Karl Freund’s ‘Mad Love,’ in which Peter Lorre plays, as Antonio Banderas does here, a deranged reconstructive surgeon with sadistic tendencies and a blood-thirst for revenge. Just as Banderas’ brilliant Dr. Ledgard, as the director’s megalomaniacal creator surrogate, deviantly crafts his own Frankenstein bride, so Almodovar creates a Frankenstein monster of a movie — a cracked, loving meditation on transformation, rebirth, and “the things a madman’s love can do.”

The story is a spiral of mysteries: Why has prominent plastic surgeon Dr. Ledgard kidnapped the beautiful young Vera and held her captive in his mansion lair? What radical experiments is he performing on her? Does it have anything to do with the car crash death of his beloved wife? And why does everyone who sees Vera think she looks so … familiar? Almodovar weaves multiple flashbacks into the tricky story, but the jumps back and forth are more motivated by psychological reverberations than the need to deliver expository information. For instance, a flashback to one character’s traumatic memory is triggered, if indirectly, by his experience of unfulfilled coitus.

As Vera, Elena Anaya (no stranger to on-screen nudity; see: ‘Room in Rome’) is more than up to the challenge of a role so focused on the physical. She has a dancer’s precision and expressiveness, combined with a natural glimmer of damage in her eyes. Banderas is also perfect as Ledgard, Cary Grant-suave on the outside, with only the smallest hint — the wavering pupil here, the rapid twitch there — to indicate the total psycho on the inside, the part that is “intoxicated with the smell of burned flesh.” In fairy tale terms, he is the cruel sorcerer with the power to transmogrify. But in this case, the sorcerer is a scientist; Banderas’ voodoo is “transgenesis,” his cauldron a petri dish, his wand a scalpel, and his secret ingredient … well, much like the fairy tale, it’s the fresh blood of a newborn (obtained in this case from the maternity ward of a hospital).

In the fairy tale, he might cast a spell to turn the heroine into a newt. Here, Almodovar employs a unique twist on the idea of physical transformation, but one thing remains the same: The body is a punishment, a prison.

‘Skin’ recalls horror movies, but it can also be viewed through the lens of prison escape movies. At its heart, it’s about resistance, about trying to discover the self (be it spiritual, psychological, or some other thing) and preserve it from the oppressive forces of control that try to get at it, emanating from mother, father, creator, lover, rapist, ennui, the sedation of pharmacology, the sad limits of the flesh, the figures of beauty, etc. And Almodovar’s defiant Ms. Frankenstein does resist. From her prison of power structures, she graffiti’s the wall (“I breathe!” she exults; “I smoke opium to forget” she laments), and hides in meditation. She is given clothes to wear; she shreds and re-stitches them into misshapen grotesques. She is given books to read; she uses the pages to slash open her wrists. Will she attempt a daring escape? Even if she does, what exactly is there to escape to?

Alberto Iglesias’ distinctive score is essential to creating the movie’s shifting moods and tones. The music is diverse but unifying, from the percolating electronica to underscore action sequences, to aching strings echoing the characters’ frustrated desires, to dissonant piano portending tragedy.

As with Vera’s synthetic second skin, Almodovar’s movie takes some adjusting to, but once you get used to it, you can live inside it a while. Multiple viewings are rewarded with hidden riches. For instance, just as our heroine is pieced together, so is her name: Vera (one of the movie’s subtler odes to Hitchcock, it’s the name of the actress the master himself reportedly most fancied, but who dropped out of ‘Vertigo,’ to Hitchcock’s apparent fury and despair, to have a baby) Cruz (Almodovar cheekily hints at a disturbing history for his own long-time muse Penelope, one which certainly can’t be found in official publicity materials).

The oddly quiet, restrained ending, which modestly fades out like a telenovela going to commercial, doesn’t go out of its way to emphasize the profound idea at its center: Almodovar’s radical invention of a new gender, a new female form that has digested and re-incorporated the redundant, vestigial male. Appropriate to Almodovar’s most Cronenberg-ian work, the audience is left in the end to testify, as it gazes on the human of the future (literally — the movie is set in 2012), “Long live the New Flesh!”

Reviewed on October 12th at the New York Film Festival

Rating 4.5 stars