The Skin I Live In (2011)
Directed by Pedro Almodóvar
A brilliant plastic surgeon creates a synthetic skin that withstands any kind of damage. His guinea pig: a mysterious and volatile woman who holds the key to his obsession.
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There's a goodly dose of Georges Franju's 1960 French horror classic "Eyes Without a Face."
There are echoes of Georges Franju’s Eyes Without a Face, Hitchcock’s Vertigo and just about anybody’s Frankenstein.
Cinephiles will recognize dreamy allusions, most obviously to Georges Franju's Eyes Without a Face, but there are also deep-red hints of early Dario Argento films, Robert Wiene's The Hands of Orlac and its remake, Karl Freund's Mad Love, and the films of David Cronenberg, among others.
The Skin I Live In is a gaudy mash-up of George Franju’s memorably queasy Eyes Without a Face, with other plot strands lifted from various other sources, including Verdi’s opera Il Trovatore.
The film has elements of Hitchcock and, most of all, George Franju's far, far superior "Eyes Without a Face," but "The Skin I Live In" is structurally rickety.
"Vertigo," "Eyes Without a Face," "Rebecca," "Frankenstein" and every mad doctor movie ever made, including "The Island of Lost Souls," are mixed into this movie's DNA.
There are echoes of Georges Franju’s Eyes Without a Face, Hitchcock’s Vertigo and just about anybody’s Frankenstein.
In a Hitchockian twist of the Vertigo variety, Almodóvar eventually reveals that characters are not who we think they are and the very idea of victimhood, which seems so clear-cut at the beginning, is actually a sticky, murky morass that leaves the theater with us.
"Vertigo," "Eyes Without a Face," "Rebecca," "Frankenstein" and every mad doctor movie ever made, including "The Island of Lost Souls," are mixed into this movie's DNA.
Part “Vertigo,” part “Beauty and the Beast,” part “Bride of Frankenstein,” Pedro Almodóvar’s “The Skin I Live In” is yet another casually masterful work from a director who has barely put a foot wrong in his 30 (!) years of feature filmmaking.
Like James Stewart's lovesick griever in Vertigo, who alters the couture and coiffure of a sales clerk to make her resemble his dead dream girl, Robert has sculpted Vera into the living effigy of his late wife.
Cornet and Suárez are young, dumb and callow, while enigmatic Marisa Paredes, the most interesting character in the movie, is like Garbo doing Mrs. Danvers in Rebecca.
"Vertigo," "Eyes Without a Face," "Rebecca," "Frankenstein" and every mad doctor movie ever made, including "The Island of Lost Souls," are mixed into this movie's DNA.
Robert Ledgard (Antonio Banderas, "You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger") is a doctor on the cutting edge of facial transplants for burn victims, but when he returns home, he hides a secret project and a secret subject only his housekeeper Marilia (Marisa Paredes, "All About My Mother") knows about.
The Skin I Live In, the new Pedro Almodóvar film, is no masterpiece and he's made a few, including the transcendent All About My Mother and Talk to Her but it's unmistakably Almodóvarian, for it touches on many motifs the 62-year-old auteur has pursued over an exemplary career now deep into its fourth decade.
The lovely Elena Anaya from “Talk to Her” is here, too, as Banderas’ prisoner without a past; so is the veteran Marisa Paredes, who did several films with Almodóvar, including the heartbreaking “All About My Mother.”
His increasingly polished and visually sumptuous films (including " Talk to Her ," " All About My Mother " and " Volver ") are packed with color and music, and while they often deal with serious themes, their mix of influences -- pop art, '50s Hollywood melodramas, high camp, film noir -- keep his concoctions buoyant, making them real "celebrations of life," if you will, rather than concoctions of outrage.
Director of the dizzying, magnificent pop confections Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown and All About My Mother, Almodovar is devoted to garish excess – ransacking popular culture to tell spinning-carousel stories of hope, anxiety and betrayal.
He came to the attention of the mainstream in late 90’s when films like All About My Mother and Talk to Her took the world by storm and picked up many respectable prizes including Oscars.
From this perspective, "The Skin I Live In" is his most provocative work in years, and his most creatively coherent since "Volver."
In films such as Volver, he triumphantly celebrates the impulsive, glamorous, crazy side of his notoriously vigorous version of the Spanish woman.
In his adaptation of Thierry Jonquet's novel, Pedro Almodóvar ("Talk to Her," "Volver") returns to themes that have informed his films for years - sexual identity and obsession, drug use, motherhood, even kidnapping and bondage - but this time around what he's brought to the screen is a jumbled mess with unsympathetic characters acting with unclear motivation.
His increasingly polished and visually sumptuous films (including " Talk to Her ," " All About My Mother " and " Volver ") are packed with color and music, and while they often deal with serious themes, their mix of influences -- pop art, '50s Hollywood melodramas, high camp, film noir -- keep his concoctions buoyant, making them real "celebrations of life," if you will, rather than concoctions of outrage.
Y cada una de esas razones tiene un título, el de varias de sus películas desde Pepi, Luci, Bom y otras chicas del montón (1980) hasta Volver (2006), donde Almodóvar se reencontraba con La Mancha y con Carmen Maura y uno se reencontraba con el mejor Almodóvar.
Director Pedro Almodóvar (“Volver,” “Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown”) cast Antonio Banderas as a gifted plastic surgeon who introduces a “super skin” that he tells the scientific community he’s successfully used on animals.
Was it "Talk to Her" that had a fantasy sequence where someone crawls out of a wardrobe-sized vagina?
In others, such as the rather creepy Talk To Her and his latest, The Skin I Live In, women are comatose or mentally ill constructs to be sewn, screwed, sedated or silenced.
Anaya ("Talk to Her") has to do little more than bask in the camera's appreciative gaze, which she holds effortlessly.
That there’s something creepy at the heart of “Skin” should surprise no one who’s seen Almodóvar’s “Matador” or “Talk to Her” or “Bad Education” or “Live Flesh,” which is also based on a novel and which, I think, this new film most resembles.
The Skin I Live In, the new Pedro Almodóvar film, is no masterpiece and he's made a few, including the transcendent All About My Mother and Talk to Her but it's unmistakably Almodóvarian, for it touches on many motifs the 62-year-old auteur has pursued over an exemplary career now deep into its fourth decade.
His best and most feverish film since 2002’s “Talk to Her,” it’s a wild mix of horror, surrealism, melodrama and transgressive sexuality – and it reunites him with his great discovery, Antonio Banderas.
That there’s something creepy at the heart of “Skin” should surprise no one who’s seen Almodóvar’s “Matador” or “Talk to Her” or “Bad Education” or “Live Flesh,” which is also based on a novel and which, I think, this new film most resembles.
In his early Almodóvar films, the actor often personified the spirit of sexual anarchy: a gay Muslim terrorist in Labyrinth of Passion, a filmmaker's gay lover in Law of Desire and, in Matador, a bullfighter who gets sexual pleasure from killing.
And at the start of his career, in films like Matador and Law of Desire, all these elements were really amplified and the films were most certainly an acquired taste.
That’s no surprise, if you recall that Almodóvar’s early career included disturbing, serious films such as Matador.
Antonio Banderas returns to work with Almodóvar for the first time in over 20-years, since his memorable performance "Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!."
After nearly two decaes, Almodovar reunites with his "Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!" star Antonio Banderas, this time playing prestigious plastic surgeon Dr. Robert Ledgard, who lost his wife in a car fire years earlier and has spent his time since trying to create a synthetic skin.
Antonio Banderas, who last made a film with Almodovar in 1990 (“Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!”), is lifeless as the plastic surgeon obsessed with Vera and providing her with “the best skin in the world.”
Banderas had previously worked with Almodóvar on his notorious Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! (1990), whose X-rating from the MPAA became fodder for controversy (happily fueled by U.S. distributor Miramax) and helped lead to the development of the NC-17.
Strong cast consists largely of Almodovar vets, led by Banderas (reteaming with the director for the first time in the 21 years since "Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!"), who makes Robert a fascinatingly seductive figure even as one recoils from the sick ends to which he takes his special gifts.
Antonio Banderas (in his first film for Almodovar since Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! in 1990) stars as Dr. Robert Ledgard, a plastic surgeon who can only be described as a mad scientist.
(Azucena, the mad gypsy woman with her tortured ideas of motherhood, has been a continual Almodóvarian inspiration; even that gabby cabdriver in Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown bore her name.)
All are touched on and one gets quite the going over in “The Skin I Live In,” a rare unpleasant evening at the movies from the director of “Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown” and “Tie Me Up, Tie Me Down.”
In “Skin,” Almodóvar is reunited with Antonio Banderas, whom he discovered in 1982’s “Labyrinth of Passion” and helmed to stardom in such films as “Law of Desire” (1987) “Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown” (1988), and “Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!” (1990), their last collaboration to now.
Director Pedro Almodóvar (“Volver,” “Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown”) cast Antonio Banderas as a gifted plastic surgeon who introduces a “super skin” that he tells the scientific community he’s successfully used on animals.
Director of the dizzying, magnificent pop confections Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown and All About My Mother, Almodovar is devoted to garish excess – ransacking popular culture to tell spinning-carousel stories of hope, anxiety and betrayal.
Much as he did with Ruth Rendell's "Live Flesh," Almodovar has taken an ice-cold psychological thriller, penned by a novelist of far less humanistic temperament, and performed some stylistic surgery of his own, adding broad comic relief, overripe melodrama, outrageous asides and zesty girl-power uplift.
That there’s something creepy at the heart of “Skin” should surprise no one who’s seen Almodóvar’s “Matador” or “Talk to Her” or “Bad Education” or “Live Flesh,” which is also based on a novel and which, I think, this new film most resembles.
Considering the fact that I've given five stars to every Pedro Almodóvar film since Live Flesh (1997), it will come as no great shock that his latest, The Skin I Live In, also comes in for the full five.
This is only the second Almodóvar films whose story he didn't dream up; the other was the 1997 Live Flesh, from a Ruth Rendell novel.
It is closest tonally to Almodovar films like Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! and Live Flesh, in that it is a thriller but the story is completely barking mad, etched with man’s twisted sensibilities.
As always, the production is visually extravagant (production design by Antxón Gómez, "Broken Embraces;" art direction by Carlos Bodelón and costume design by Paco Delgado) and Alberto Iglesias's ("Che," "Broken Embraces") swirling percussive score, punctuated first by horns then violins, adds to the offbeat environment.
It's less narrative and ultimately less entertaining than Almodóvar's previous effort Broken Embraces, but it's a pleasure to reminded of Banderas as an actor of weight.
That said, I'd say it's far more likely to upset people than Volver (2006) or Broken Embraces (2009) did.
But it's never been more apt than in the chilling "Skin," which has as much in common with classic horror movies (most obviously, "Frankenstein") as with the Alfred Hitchcock films that seem to have inspired Almodovar's recent films like "Bad Education" and "Broken Embraces."
So often most recently in the 2009 Broken Embraces Almodóvar has dramatized a man's severe reaction to the loss of his beloved.
That there’s something creepy at the heart of “Skin” should surprise no one who’s seen Almodóvar’s “Matador” or “Talk to Her” or “Bad Education” or “Live Flesh,” which is also based on a novel and which, I think, this new film most resembles.
And being an Almodóvar work, it's also the sort of film that will very likely alienate and even infuriate some viewers -- though probably not to the extent that Bad Education did in 2004.
Parents need to know that this boundary-pushing drama/thriller from celebrated Spanish filmmaker Pedro Almodovar (and starring Antonio Banderas ) is arguably his most perverse, controversial film to date, even more so than 2004's Bad Education .
But it's never been more apt than in the chilling "Skin," which has as much in common with classic horror movies (most obviously, "Frankenstein") as with the Alfred Hitchcock films that seem to have inspired Almodovar's recent films like "Bad Education" and "Broken Embraces."
In “Skin,” Almodóvar is reunited with Antonio Banderas, whom he discovered in 1982’s “Labyrinth of Passion” and helmed to stardom in such films as “Law of Desire” (1987) “Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown” (1988), and “Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!” (1990), their last collaboration to now.
In his early Almodóvar films, the actor often personified the spirit of sexual anarchy: a gay Muslim terrorist in Labyrinth of Passion, a filmmaker's gay lover in Law of Desire and, in Matador, a bullfighter who gets sexual pleasure from killing.
In “Skin,” Almodóvar is reunited with Antonio Banderas, whom he discovered in 1982’s “Labyrinth of Passion” and helmed to stardom in such films as “Law of Desire” (1987) “Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown” (1988), and “Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!” (1990), their last collaboration to now.
In his early Almodóvar films, the actor often personified the spirit of sexual anarchy: a gay Muslim terrorist in Labyrinth of Passion, a filmmaker's gay lover in Law of Desire and, in Matador, a bullfighter who gets sexual pleasure from killing.
Cinephiles will recognize dreamy allusions, most obviously to Georges Franju's Eyes Without a Face, but there are also deep-red hints of early Dario Argento films, Robert Wiene's The Hands of Orlac and its remake, Karl Freund's Mad Love, and the films of David Cronenberg, among others.
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Almodóvar has tempered Jonquet's extremely cruel tale, shifted the relationships around and relocated the narrative to Toledo, the beautiful city south of Madrid where his idol, Luis Buñuel, set his 1970 masterpiece Tristana, a psychological drama of controlled savagery about the destructive affair between an elderly, liberal aristocrat (Fernando Rey) and his beautiful ward (Catherine Deneuve).
I kept wondering what the more substantial Javier Bardem would have been like in the part, with his mournful aspect of having seen and done all and regretted much of it, and also thought about Colin Clive, who was so ineffably, grippingly crazy in that granddaddy of the genre, Frankenstein.
(Vertigo is a clear antecedent, as are James Whale’s Frankenstein and Georges Franju’s Eyes Without A Face.)
Cinephiles will recognize dreamy allusions, most obviously to Georges Franju's Eyes Without a Face, but there are also deep-red hints of early Dario Argento films, Robert Wiene's The Hands of Orlac and its remake, Karl Freund's Mad Love, and the films of David Cronenberg, among others.
In film, previously, we saw such finesse at work in “The Mosquito Coast” (1986), a Paul Theroux adaptation in which Harrison Ford plays an inventor who moves his family to Belize to start a new life . . .
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Or maybe, given the premise, perhaps the movie is a bizarre misfire like Boxing Helena, the infamous film in which Julian Sands keeps chopping the limbs off of Sherilyn Fenn, or I Know Who Killed Me, in which Lindsay Lohan plays a limb-losing stripper?
Perhaps most impressive of all is how José Luis Alcaine, the director of photography, has lit the 'new' skin of Ledgard's unwilling guinea pig, given the identify of Vera Cruz (Elena Anaya, "Cairo Time," "Point Blank") by her captor.
Though the film is structured in such a way that not everything about his motives is clear for some considerable time, it is immediately clear that he is not only driven by some central experience to perfect a synthetic skin that can stand up to just about any kind of assault on it, but that he has a captive woman, Vera (Elena Anaya, Point Blank), on whom he is conducting his experiments.