By Chlotrudis Independent Film Society
Rating: 4.4
Director: Pedro Almodóvar
Starring: Antonio Banderas | Eduard Fernández | Elena Anaya | Jan Cornet | Marisa Paredes | Roberto Álamo
Original language title: La piel que habito
Country: spain
Year: 2011
Running time: 117
IMDB: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1189073/
Bruce says: “THE SKIN I LIVE IN is an adaptation of the French novel Mygale by Thierry Jonquet. Judging from what I have read about the novel, Almodóvar’s adaptation is a very loose one. For a decade I have wished that Almodóvar would let someone else write his screenplays for they are always the weakest link in an otherwise strong chain. Almodóvar certainly attained master status long before turning sixty. Now sixty two his resumé is impressive although one must ponder whether his best work is behind him.
“Antonio Banderas plays Robert Ledgard, a plastic surgeon with an infamous laboratory at his home in Toledo. The premises are overseen by his maid Marilia (Marisa Paredes). His wife died in a fiery car crash with Marilia ’s son (Roberto Álamo) with whom she was having an affair. His daughter committed suicide after being raped at a wedding party. Ledgard has been developing new techniques for skin grafting and face reconstruction. Transgenics, the transfer of genes from one species to another, figures prominently in his various reconstruction solutions. We see that he has a client named Vera Curz (Elena Anaya) locked in a ‘safe room’ while she undergoes recovery from her various surgeries. Ledgard spies on her using a two-way mirror.
“His professional acumen comes in handy when he decides to avenge his daughter’s death. As in many of recent Almodóvar films, the plot moves forward with many shocking twists; however, the editing occasionally sacrifices clarity in order to sustain the suspense.
“Banderas, star of earlier Almodóvar films THE LABYRINTH OF PASSION, MATADOR, LAW OF DESIRE, WOMEN ON THE VERGE OF A NERVOUS BREAKDOWN, and TIE ME UP! TIE ME DOWN!, has aged wonderfully and looks the part of a sophisticated surgeon; his acting skills are barely challenged, however. The other actors are well-cast and perform admirably.
“As usual the production design is rich with saturated color and the scenes are magnificently crafted. Many great artists derive their inspiration from other sources. In the case of THE SKIN I LIVE IN, Almodóvar draws on the B-movie horror genre from the 1950s as well as from EYES WITHOUT A FACE, Georges Franju’s 1960 French horror classic. Almodóvar’s stylistic muse for the film is the brilliant sculptor Louise Bourgeois. An excerpt from THE SPIDER, THE MISTRESS AND THE TANGERINE, a documentary about Bourgeois, is briefly used in the film. The parallels between the techniques employed in Bourgeois’ sculptures and those of Ledgard’s plastic surgery are uncanny. 4 cats”
Thom says: “This was featured at TIFF 2011 but I wasn’t honored my request to see it; the same thing happened with another Almodovar film at TIFF 2009. I recently saw it in San Francisco and my rating is 5 cats. I thought it was the best film by the Spanish master since his TALK TO HER. So different from anything that the director has done before here dipping into science fiction and thriller genres. Not knowing the original work Almodovar is famous for altering source material. His adaptation of Ruth Rendell’s LIVE FLESH, while entertaining, drifted far from the novel. In this inspired work he is heavily influence by both Georges Franju’s EYES WITHOUT A FACE (1960) & Hiroshi Teshigahara’s THE FACE OF ANOTHER (1966), both top-of-the-line classics. Banderas is scary as the control-freak plastic surgeon determined to recreate his dead wife by hook-or-by-crook. There’s something about a bi-polar suicidal daughter and a perverted revenge. Wild fun with one payoff after another. The delicious Marisa Parades (isn’t she President of the Spanish Academy of Motion Pictures Arts & Sciences?) (always perfect with Almodovar: ALL ABOUT MY MOTHER, HIGH HEELS, TALK TO HER, THE FLOWER OF MY SECRET) plays the macabre doctor’s personal assistant and maybe something more as well. This is shy-high entertainment.”
Chris says: “His last film, BROKEN EMBRACES, was almost Pedro Almodovar on auto-pilot: a predictably lush, easily digestible melodrama that, while amiable enough, felt a little stale compared to the director’s past work (self-referential nods to those very same films didn’t help). Thus, the mere prospect of a reunion with former muse Antonio Banderas (who worked with Almodovar at his most creatively fertile period) at once carries substantial promise and a little apprehension–would it be a return to form or a calculated attempt to recapture past glory?
“Perhaps expectedly, THE SKIN I LIVE IN falls somewhere in between those two extremes. It’s not as wild or brazen as, say, MATADOR, but it doesn’t feel like a complete retread either. In an incredibly ornate, castle-like estate (as much a main character of the film as any single person), renowned plastic surgeon Robert Ledgard (Banderas) and his mother, Marilia (Marisa Paredes) hold young Vera Cruz (Elena Anaya) hostage. Ostensibly a burn victim, Vera is a guinea pig Robert uses to painstakingly construct a new synthetic, sustainable skin that sheathes her entire body.
“As usual with late-period Almodovar, what we initially see is a ruse and what’s actually happening is not clarified until much later in the film. Happily, what slowly reveals itself as an exceptionally twisted narrative brings out the best in the director, who hasn’t made a film so creepy and oddly comforting in years. Additionally, his careful unraveling of such an outrageous story also both shocks and compels at all the right beats. Banderas is superbly cast in a role that utilizes his strengths as a smarmy lothario, commanding villain and demented genius.
“Although great, pulpy fun, I can’t see THE SKIN I LIVE IN acquiring as lofty a place in the director’s canon as WOMEN ON THE VERGE OF A NERVOUS BREAKDOWN or even VOLVER–in those films, characters often transcended their fanciful, outrageous situations. Here, they service the narrative and little else. Thankfully, it’s a good narrative and the way in which Almodovar obviously relishes it indicates he hasn’t deferred to permanent creative auto-pilot yet. 4 1/2 cats”
Jason says: “Pedro Almodovar has been dancing around doing this sort of weird sci-fi/horror movie for years (remember the silent movie sequence in TALK TO HER?), and in a way he’s still dancing – THE SKIN I LIVE IN is so grounded in the here and now and focused on the psychological as opposed to the technological that art-house denizens who run screaming from mere ‘genre’ can convince themselves that they’re not sharing their genius with their grindhouse cousins. Their loss; the way Almodovar imports those genre elements into his world is part of what makes the movie so delicious.
“We start with scientist Robert Ledgard (Antonio Banderas), a brilliant surgeon and researcher presenting a paper on the potential for synthetic skin to a conference – a topic near to his heart after his wife was horrifically burned in a car accident years ago. His colleagues are so alarmed by the ethical problems of his proposal that he assures them that it is only theoretical – and then goes home to see how the most recent graft is taking to Vera (Elena Anaya), the test subject he is keeping so isolated that she kept locked in a room in his estate, with Robert and longtime family servant Marilla (Marisa Paredes) mostly speaking to her via TV screens. And as we come to know more about Robert’s complicated obsession, it becomes very clear that this set-up is not merely the result of fears of contamination.
“THE SKIN I LIVE IN at times seems to have more ideas in play than it knows what to do with – in fact, my impression was often of two similar screenplays not quite fully merged into one – and in the hands of a lesser director than Almodovar, it likely would have been a trite mess (I don’t know how many threads are Almodovar’s own and how many come from the source novel, Thierry Jonquet’s Tarantula). There are thoroughly extraneous bits of soap opera, on the one hand, while Robert and Vera seem to have two different experiments and plotlines going on that are close to being at cross-purposes. Almodovar strives to make this into complexity rather than contradiction, and manages it about half the time.
“Just by doing that much, though, he and Banderas have made Robert Ledgard one of the greatest mad scientists in cinema history. ‘Mad scientist’ is a term that conjures images of pulps and simplistic comics, a simple way to create a villain who is both superhumanly capable and evil, but Ledgard is what you get when you try to make the concept work in real life: A researcher driven to make the world a better place and a psychopath craving the destruction of those he believes to be enemies. Usually, these urges are portrayed as opposing impulses, to be weighed against each other; here, they are completely intertwined. In the plot, creation is destruction, and vice versa; similarly, while Antonio Banderas digs into the arrogance and cruelty of his character with gusto, he also works an almost naïve romanticism in as well. It’s a fascinatingly multifaceted character and performance, likely better than anything Banderas has done in English over the past two decades.
“Opposite him, the lovely Elena Anaya is portraying a different but equally fascinating character – where Robert Ledgard is a tangle of conflicting urges and reactions, Vera Cruz represents focus as the only means of survival. The question Almodovar asks with her is whether Ledgard’s experiments are changing her soul as well as her skin, and whether the masks one wears to make it through difficult situations become real (as it very literally does in Vera’s case). Anaya plays Vera as an intriguing mystery both before and after we learn about her past, and does especially impressive work toward the end – her last scenes are an amazing combination of determination, torment, and pragmatism. It’s great, measured work.
“The rest of the cast impresses, too. Marisa Paredes beautifully twists a part that would often be Ledgard’s conscience into something the often reflects his worst characteristics, while Roberto Alamo dives right into her monstrous son. Bianca Suarez finds both the strong appeal and mental fragility of Robert’s daughter Norma, and Jan Cornet hits a very precise target with the boy Norma meets at a wedding. If Cornet makes his character even slightly more or less appealing, THE SKIN I LIVE IN becomes a simple revenge or horror movie instead of an often-fascinating merger of the two.
Indeed, picture ‘revenge’ and ‘horror’ as filling in for the ‘male’ and ‘female’ in the classic yin-yang diagram; individually simple genre exercises that become far more interesting when combined in this way. While the details of what the characters do are occasionally a bit questionable, the way they do it is both intriguing and thrilling enough to make The Skin I Live In kind of exceptional, what could be a Frankenstein’s Monster made into a thing of beauty. 4 1/2 cats
“Seen 3 November 2011 in Landmark Kendall Square #8 (first-run)”