Nak's Nook: Almodovar's skin flick: skin deep?

By Julio Nakamurakare / Herald staff

FILM REVIEW

According to biologists, the longest and biggest human organ is skin, which wraps our entire body and protects it from the hazardous elemented created by Nature itself and by man-made substances. If fully meeting biological requirements, the skin should also be malleable and porous enough to let non-organic agents filter through — such as love and emotions.
The human skin — hardened or soft, protectiveyet utterly fragile — is ever present in Spanish filmmaker Pedro Almodóvar's latest movie, La piel que habito (The Skin I Live In). Known for his penchant for outrageously comic and thought-provoking situations, Almodóvar is the true master of genre crossing and — in keeping with the biological allusions in his new flick — nothing short of a successful skin graft was expected from him in the film that marks his reunion with actor Antonio Banderas, who rose from Almodóvar's fetish actor to international stardom in the emblematic dream factory called Hollywood.
As for Almodóvar himself, very little can be said about him that hasn't been said before, from “Spanish cinema's enfant térrible” in his early years, to comparisons with the greatest film geniuses. After establishing a solid —and well deserved — reputation with a trio of films in the early to mid 1990s, Almodóvar had free rein and fully indulged in the possibility of coming up with a knockout of a movie every time he made a new film.
From 1980's Pepi, Luci, Bom, 1982's Matador, 1984's Labyrinth of Passions, and 1984's What Have I Done to DeserveThis?, the only way for Almodóvar was up. He duly complied, producing another mesmerizing twosome: The Law of Desire, 1987; and Women on the Verge of Nervous Breakdown, 1988. Women..., which landed Amodóvar his first Golden Globe and Oscar nominations as well as two Toronto and Venice wins, definitely sealed his reputation as a genius audiences learned to expect something utterly from with each new outing. Which he did, putting out films as diverse in genre and narrative style as they were indisputably original in their treatment of off-putting subject matter and issues.

Almodóvar's latest, the Cannes Best Film nominee The Skin I Live In, based on French writer Thierry Jonquet's nouvelle Mygale (published in the UK as Tarantula), full as it is with sinister characters and events on the verge of insanity, is no less provocative than any of his previous movies.
Although The Skin I Live In promised much, much more than Almodóvar's trademark concoctions of love and betrayal, betrayal and vengeance, vengeance and remorse, remorse and redemption, there is actualy very little skin to be explored in the new Almodóvar, neither firm nor smooth, and far from silky in spite of the stunning beauty of actress Elena Anaya.
There's two women in the life of plastic surgeon Robert Ledgard (Banderas), who we first see delivering an academic lecture on his latest medical research advance.As in any well-moulded cautionary tale, Ledgard's mentor and friend, Dr. José Luis Gómez (Fernando Calvo) warns the respected Ledgard that, his latest work on organic skin has crossed the borderline between science and ethics. But there is clearly no way of talking Ledgard out of his new experiment, for it's not out of professional excellence that he has carried out his painstaking research. Deep inside, there's a much, much more profound and disquieting reason for his obsession with creating a perfect synthetic replacement for human skin, mostly for treatment of burnt and physically deformed patients.
Only a few years back, Ledgard, his wife and their daughter suffered a car crash. Ledgar and daughter came out almost unscathed, but his wife was badly burnt on 90 percent of her skin. Unable to survive without her, Ledgard performs a miracle: he saves his wife, who makes a slow recovery thanks to Ledgard's skin grafts which render her, in physical appearance, as somethiing of a synthetic skin patchwork. She has made it, she has survived, but, at what cost? A mirror confronts her with the awful truth. Tragedy strikes.
Shortly afterwards, Ledgard's life is once again shaken to its very foundations: his teenage daughter becomes the victim of brutal rape.
This, in a nutshell, is what Thierry Jonquet'ts nouvelle and Almodóvar's movie have in common, at least in narrative terms. From then on, Almodóvar's wise adaptation bifurcates in a multiplicity of directions, but there are as many layers of disturbingly bizarre incidents in his movie as in Ledgard's deranged mind.
Film auteurs and writers do have the right to revisit, once and again, the same old themes that haunt their imagination. That is, provided those obsessions do not become repetitive to the point of triteness.
In Almodóvar's mesmerizingy diverse oeuvre there's a host of themes that keep cropping up, such as uprootedness, the loss of one's sense of belonging, devoted love and affection as well as cruel treachery, delusion vs. reality, confusion and veracity, confrontation and reconciliation, long-forgotten life stories and thinly veiled present occurrences with tinges from the past.
All these elements, as could rightly be expected from Almodóvar, are present in The Skin I Live In, as well as his much-touted reinvention as the film auteur who turns previous notions of gore upside down.
Gore, the film genre known for sexploitation and blood splatter galore, has a somewhat irritating fixation with rules that prompt the wish to bend or even break them all. And here's Almodóvar turning gore on its head, infusing it with overintellectualized behavioural explanationsand lush, stilish, striking visions of infernal delight.
The Skin I Live In, it must be admitted, has plenty of assets and credits — such as the splendid photography by José Luis Alcaine, an Almodóvar stalwart, and the magnificently designed attires that shroud Almodóvar's bodies when not in a state of complete disrobement. That, and the skin-tight performances by Banderas — who pulls it off as the seasoned veteran screen veteran he is — and the ambiguously fragile and surprisingly patient and strong Vera Cruz, played by Elena Anaya as the ubiquitous victim-avenger present in almost all Almodóvar stories.
Other than this, however, The Skin I Live In does not liveup to its stated premise. The brainy Almodóvar himself was quoted as citing as influence behind the film no less than Luis Buñuel, but not in general terms. Buñuel, indeed, is referenced in the opening scene, which supposedly winks out to connoisseurs with long, meticulous remembrances of the Viridiana scene in which the Silvia Pinal character is persecuted by her pathologically obsessed stalker. Almodóvar specifically pointed out — as guidelines to The Skin...viewers — that his latest movie contains more specific allusions to James Whale's Frankenstein, Hitchcock's Rebecca and Vertigo, all of Fritz Lang's oeuvre, Gothic and film noir aesthetics, the infamous Hammer Studios, the Dario Argento gialli, and the gore master Mario Bava.
The long name-dropping as flaunted by film critics also includes references to Herzog. Under which pretense, I'm not quite sure. They may all be right, but the truth remains that The Skin I Live In, slow-moving and with a wayward, confusing narrative in spite of the explanatory intertitles for hare-brained viewers like this scribe, is an insatisfactory product on most counts, and Almodóvar's admirable body of work may go to his own detriment, for it is inevitably compared with The Skin I Live In. Indeed, we have all learned to expect a head-twisting shocker from every move by Almodóvar, as in the weirdly fascinating Talk to Her, organically and genetically repulsive at first but oddly compulsive on further scrutiny.
This is clearly not the case with The Skin I Live In. This time round, Almodóvar gest lost in the maze he himself has built in the image of Dr. Robert Ledgard, a calque of the sweetly, achingly, neurotically obsessed Ricky played by Banderas in Tie Me Up, Tie Me Down! (1992), in which the game of opposites functioned much more efficiently than in the shallow, disappointingly superficial The Skin I Live In.
As can be surmised, The Skin I Live In fails to run smoothly, and, in spite of all the hype, there is no “Almodóvar plunges into new philosophical depths” here.
PRODUCTION NOTES
La piel que habito (The Skin I Live In). Spain, 2011. Written by: Pedro and Agustín Almodóvar based on Thierry Jonquet's Tarantula. Directed by: Pedro Almodóvar. With: Antonio Banderas, Elena Anaya, Jan Cornet, Marisa Paredes. Distributed by: Diamond Films. NC16. Running time: 118 minutes.
* Published in The Buenos Aires Herald on November 3rd, 2011.