8/10
You will enjoy particular films even more if you do not know
very much beforehand; think The Sixth Sense or The
Crying Game. Previews nowadays
give away everything including the set up, the conflict, its climax, and
sometimes even the ending all before you go and see it. The preview for The Skin I Live In
sidesteps the problem of giving things away by only showing select scenes set
to music. There is no dialogue to listen
to for the potential audience member to find out who is doing what and why. Whoever had the idea to limit this preview did
everyone a favor.
I will only cover the basics of the plot because you really
want to go into this film as ‘blind’ as possible. Robert Legard (Antonio Banderas) is a brilliant scientist and surgeon. He is on the leading edge of his field which
has far exceeded standard plastic surgery.
He has been involved in the first face transplants and is conducting
extensive and methodical research into creating a new form of skin, one which
is tougher than normal human skin whose practical application is to help burn
victims but has the possibility to go much further than that.
At home, Robert is just as methodical and precise as he is
at work. His live-in house keeper
Marilia (Marisa Paredes) runs a
tight ship to keep everything in order and Robert’s personal research lives
upstairs in a locked room. Vera (Elena Anaya) is Robert’s captive and
his prized research specimen. I will
stop the set up description right here.
Directed by Pedro
Almodovar, The Skin I Live In is a suspenseful thriller and verges on
horror; however, in the director’s own words, it is a “horror story without
screams or frights”. Robert is a modern
day mad scientist, but instead of having an open lab with electricity captured
from lightening bolts, he has a scalpel and a sterile workspace. Almodovar adapted the screenplay from Tarantula,
a novel by Thierry Jonquet.
Since it is an Almodovar film, The Skin I Live In
contains certain themes which are very common in most of his films. The first is that it has family secrets. Almodovar loves family secrets; think back to
All
About My Mother and Volver which were oozing to the core
with them. He is a director who loves to
go into people’s attics, find a chest full of dusty old secrets, pop the lid,
and rip them out just like he would old clothes.
The second theme here which we have seen Almodovar cover
before is gender identity. How society
and individuals view themselves as male and female has always intrigued him,
most recently in Bad Education. There are
scenes here which reminded me a bit of The Human Centipede but it is
nowhere near that tasteless or insane. The Skin
I Live In wanders around a bit at first before you learn what is really
going on and the reasons behind it. Once
you learn that, you will understand it has not been wandering around at all, it
has just been setting you up for one hell of a story.
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