Film reviews
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The Skin I Live In (Film)
Rating: MA
Running Time: 120
Country: Spain
Distributor: Transmission
Release Date: December 26, 2011
Film Worth: $18.00
FILMINK rates movies out of $20 - the score indicates the amount we believe a ticket to the movie to be worthBeautifully shot, compellingly disturbing, and featuring a labyrinthine plot which ingeniously comes together, this is one of Pedro Almodovar’s best.
Spanish master Pedro Almodovar (Women On The Verge Of A Nervous Breakdown, Volver, All About My Mother, Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down) has always been a splendidly singular and eccentric writer-director, and this is one of his best and most original films to date. It's also beautifully shot, with a style that oscillates between crisp and vivid hyper-realism and brooding murkiness. But it's the sheer ingenuity of the storyline which really shines here, and which commands our attention.
One time regular Almodovar muse, Antonio Banderas, is well cast as Dr. Robert Ledgard, a Toledo plastic surgeon whose wife was fatally burned in a car crash. In the years since - it is now 2012 - his mission has been to develop a form of artificial skin which is both sensitive and capable of withstanding any damage. He refers to his work as "transgenesis", and has been systematically and painstakingly practicing it on a young woman called Vera (Elena Anaya). In next to no time, the mood changes from ambiguously unsettling to deeply disturbing, what with the brutal behaviour of a thug in a tiger costume and flashbacks to other life-changing and dramatic events. Circumspection is in order when alluding to the details of a suspenseful tale like this, but suffice to say that at different stages they involve Robert's brother, his mentally fragile daughter, and his dedicated housekeeper, Marilia (Marisa Paredes)...and a sex-change operation. Throughout it all, Robert exudes both buttoned-down suaveness and troubled intensity.
The Skin I Live In has an extraordinarily labyrinthine plot, yet it all fits together with the admirable cohesion of a Hitchcock thriller. And, given the bizarreness of some of the events, it's a tribute to the deft character delineation that they all seem quite plausible. Well worth seeing.
