Film REVIEW The Skin I Live In

Dense, dark and gripping, Spanish director Pedro Almodóvar’s new melodrama takes a demented B-movie plot and turns it into a classy psychological thriller with echoes of Hitchcock. The Skin I Live In’s most obvious allusion, though, is to Frankenstein. Antonio Banderas plays the archetypal mad scientist, although the crazy hair and wild eyes have been replaced with sharply tailored designer suits, slicked back hair and a steely gaze that barely covers the danger raging underneath.

Robert Ledgard (played with understated menace by Banderas) is a top plastic surgeon. While admired by his peers for his brilliance, his extreme methods – he is using pig skin in a dubious process called transgenesis – and cavalier attitude to medical ethics have alienated him somewhat from the scientific community. As a result, the secretive Ledgard conducts most of his experiments at his elegant mansion in Toledo, Spain, where tasteful nudes on the wall and highbrow reading material exist above an operating theater in the basement.

The house is also home to Vera, a mysterious woman kept – apparently contentedly – under lock and key, who is the doctor’s guinea pig in his quest to create perfect burn-proof synthetic skin,
an ambition prompted by his late wife’s horrific disfigurement in a car accident.
But his spouse’s fate is not the only past heartbreak driving Ledgard. Using flashback, the film slowly reveals the deranged doctor’s family history and the series of macabre events that have led to Vera’s current confinement. Meanwhile the present ramifications of the Spanish Frankenstein’s mad mission threaten to implode as Vera becomes increasingly unstable and the surgeon’s peers’ suspicions grow.

The Skin I Live In combines elements of thriller, drama, melodrama and horror, though the latter is expressed through slow burn rather than the usual sudden shocks – no mirrored medicine cabinets are closed to reveal a psychopath in the bathroom here. Instead, the full terror of the doctor’s endeavors is divulged steadily, by a confident director at the top of his game. This is so powerfully done that the denouement, which returns to more conventional thriller-drama territory, is a marked release of tension and almost feels like a different film.

Ignoring the preposterousness of the plot – which the caliber of the movie makes it easy if not inevitable to do – Almodóvar’s creation is pure quality. The performances are all perfect – the brilliant Banderas’s controlled turn in particular makes it clear how wasted his talents have been in Hollywood action schlock. Extensive care has gone into the visuals, which are rich in texture and symbolism, while the score, from long-term Almodóvar collaborator Alberto Iglesias, complements the evocative settings.

Audiences familiar with the director only through Volver are in for a shock, with that film’s warm celebration of womanhood replaced by a madman’s ruthless recreation of a female in his preferred image, a pronounced allusion to Hitchcock’s Vertigo. As such, The Skin I Live In often makes for uncomfortable viewing, but it presents a darkly beautiful, compelling nightmare.

debbie.stowe@business-review.ro

Directed by: Pedro Almodóvar
Starring: Antonio Banderas, Elena Anaya, Marisa Paredes, Jan Cornet, Roberto Álamo and Blanca Suárez
On at: (in Spanish with Romanian subtitles) Cinema City Cotroceni, Cinema City Sun Plaza, Glendale Studio, Grand Cinema Digiplex Baneasa, Hollywood Multiplex, Noul cinematograf al regizorului roman – Studioul Horia Bernea, Studio, The Light Cinema