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.
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.
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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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.
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).
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.
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.
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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.
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.)