The Skin I Live In

Silence of the Lambda

Grade: B –

Direcotor: Pedro Almodóvar

Starring: Antonio Banderas, Elena Anaya, Marisa Paredes, Blanca Suarez and Jan Cornet

MPAA Rating: R

Running Time:  2 hr.

Like most films by Pedro Almodóvar, the meaning behind The Skin I Live In has little to do with its actual plot. Perhaps harkening somewhat back to his more macabre early cinema, the 62-year-old director presents a rather mannered specimen of body horror, grafting what amounts to an antiseptic approximation of Georges Franju’s Eyes Without a Face – or an art-house version of The Human Centipede – onto a story that is, in the end, All About Almodóvar.

In The Skin I Live In, former cast regular Antonio Banderas reteams with Almodóvar after a 21-year hiatus for a movie that shares themes with their last collaboration, Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!. Banderas plays Robert Ledgard, a plastic surgeon who, after his wife’s fiery disfigurement and subsequent suicide, creates a synthetic skin derived from pig flesh that is resistant to heat, infection and other maladies. Although the scientific community shuns Ledgard’s discovery, the doctor has been secretly testing his developmental dermis on Vera (Elena Anaya), a dainty brunette locked behind the gates of Ledgard’s Toledo manse. Vera, clad in a flesh-colored body stocking, wiles away her days by reading, practicing yoga and scrawling on the walls of her well-furnished but sterile one-room home, visible only via video surveillance monitored by Marilia (Marisa Paredes), the doctor’s longtime housekeeper, and a two-way mirror separating Vera from Ledgard’s bedroom.

Is Vera a patient or prisoner, a convalescing medical marvel or bride of Frankenstein? Almodóvar caps the careful contrived mystery enveloping the film’s first act with the sudden arrival of Marilia’s fugitive son, a snarling reprobate camouflaged in a carnival tiger costume who ravishes a helpless Vera.

These events – including Ledgard’s reaction – segue into an extended flashback that weaves the doctor’s traumatized daughter (Blanca Suarez) and her own (wrongfully-accused) rapist (Jan Cornet) into the narrative. This jarring background and the campy climax that eventually follows provide explication, but at the expense of nuance.

The Skin I Live In is hyper-realized illustration of Almodóvar’s fondness for sheer audience manipulation. It’s the only viable explanation for an erratic story that would have more impact – and clarity – if its timeline was more linear. Instead, Almodóvar has other aims, toying with the viewers’ emotions and sexual mores. Actions in the film’s first half that are teeming with titillation soon become objects of repulsion, a metamorphosis triggered simply by storytelling and not any change in onscreen personnel.

But, while the film is partly a mirror reflecting the audience’s psyche, it is more a window into Almodóvar’s. The director transforms this adaptation of Theirry Jonquet’s novel Tarantula into a Grand Guignol film à clef. We learn offhandedly that Vera’s last name is Cruz – indeed, the longer the film goes the more Anaya conspicuously resembles Almodóvar’s erstwhile muse Penelope (who was once slated to play Vera).

Through Ledgard, Almodóvar projects his own creative complexities, an exercise that manages to be both self-deprecating and self-aggrandizing. Viewed cynically, he essentially equates actors with livestock – swine, if you will – that only mature through the guidance of his nurturing hands. At the same time, Almodóvar juxtaposes the chaos of creation with the beauty it can yield. For Ledgard (and, by extension, Almodóvar), Vera is no mere muse. She – like the recurrent members of the filmmaker’s renowned acting stable – is an objet d'art, a work of splendor born out of brilliance, obsession and, yes, madness.

Still, none of this makes The Skin I Live more than a bizarre but surprisingly bloodless curio in its auteur’s oeuvre. Absent its distinctive tableau and knotty plot twists, the film is a must-see only for Almodóvar diehards. Everyone else will be left wondering whether Javier Bardem has ever gone by the nickname El Tigre.

Neil Morris