La piel que habito
Pedro Almodóvar (2011)
The rhythm of The Skin I Live In, edited by José Salcedo, has an inexorable, sinister quality that makes the film more compelling than either of Almodóvar’s last two movies, Broken Embraces and, before that, the smooth but thinly-textured Volver. The lustrous images are defined with razor-sharp clarity by José Luis Alcaine – not only the vivid, startling combinations of colour which you expect in Almodóvar but also the clinical appurtenances peculiar to this story: the hygienic, soulless gleam of surgical instruments, the ominous but oddly sensual rustle of gowns and sheets in the operating theatre, at the very private clinic of Robert Ledgard (Antonio Banderas). The mannequins, masks and maquettes, recurring throughout the film in a range of physical contexts, also have an extraordinary variety of texture. The surgeon’s prize patient Vera Cruz (Elena Anaya) wears a flesh-coloured body stocking that covers every bit of her except the face (reminding you that’s just the area concealed by criminals using nylon-tights disguises). When the robber Zeca (Roberto Álamo), on the run from the police, arrives at Robert’s clinic and asks his mother Marilia (Marisa Paredes), Ledgard’s housekeeper, to hide him, it’s carnival time: Zeca is wearing a tiger outfit, a mansize version of the carnival get-up we’re told he always wore as a child. (The sequence in which this costumed beast breaks into the bowels of the clinic and rapes Vera – cutting open her body-stocking to expose her breasts – is somewhat reminiscent of the assault on the writer’s wife in A Clockwork Orange but, although shocking, it doesn’t have the detachment of the Kubrick sequence: Zeca may look and behave like an animal but you feel his hunger.) The film’s poster, with the faces of Banderas and Anaya in close-up side by side, introduces the textural mysteries of the film: his complexion looks as artificial as hers.
As might be expected from Almodóvar, what makes The Skin I Live In more than another sci-fi-ish melodrama about the perversion of medical expertise are the elements of sexual ambiguity – amounting to transgender elastics – and the balance of power in sexual relationships. Exchanges between a character in charge and another on the receiving end are given an edge by one of the pair being naked or half-naked: the complication is sometimes that the aggressor is the unclothed one, as when Zeca rapes Vera Cruz. Vera is created by Robert Ledgard both to reanimate his beloved wife, who committed suicide when she saw that her face had been destroyed in the fire that followed a car crash, and to avenge the later suicide of his daughter Norma (Blanca Suárez), who was traumatised first by her mother’s death, then by the attentions of Vicente (Jan Cornet). He works in a dress shop run by his mother – a set-up that might lead you to expect Vicente to be gay. In fact, he’s the only character in The Skin I Live In who seems both straight and straightforward – until he’s kidnapped by Robert. (Almodóvar could be making fun of our likely assumptions by making Vicente hetero but his mother’s assistant in the shop a lesbian, who spurns Vicente.)
Having abducted Vicente, Robert demonstrates a surgical range beyond the facial reconstruction we assumed to be his specialty by carrying out a gender reassignment operation on the young man. He then keeps him – that is, Vera Cruz – prisoner. So when Robert sleeps with Vera Cruz – a woman who was once a man who tried to penetrate Robert’s daughter who lost her mind when she lost her mother who was Robert’s true love – it’s a pairing of formidable psychosexual complexity. Robert’s housekeeper Marilia turns out to be his mother as well as Zeca’s. And, perhaps predictably, Robert eventually dies at the hand of his own creation. The sexual identity contortions of the plot are almost comically intricate – yet, in the closing scene, when Vera/Vicente returns to her/his mother in the dress shop, the effect is touching too.
I didn’t like the film at first: the mise en scène, because it isn’t strongly connected to the characters, is impressive but empty; the sinister skin graft story seems too obviously borrowed from Eyes Without a Face. The source material for Almodóvar’s screenplay is a 1995 novel called Mygale (or ‘Tarantula’) by the French writer Thierry Jonquet; and the film has its clumsy aspects which, even if they derive from the original, Almodóvar hasn’t managed to resolve. For example, the bald, wordy explanation of who’s who makes the careful crypticness of the first half of The Skin I Live In seem, in retrospect, a waste of effort. Yet from the point at which Vicente enters the story it livens up. When Robert is in his car hunting Vicente down, the warm red light of the speedometer is exciting: Almodóvar has a talent for making images that generate a complicity between the audience and a character up to no good. Alberto Iglesias’s score, excitative and elegiac by turns, expresses the film’s increasingly various moods. A crazed medic horror movie is a new departure for Almodóvar but his humour hasn’t deserted him: details like the incongruously bouncing tail on Zeca’s tiger suit and a scene in which a man comes into the dress shop wanting to get rid of his ex-wife’s wardrobe made me laugh.
Almodóvar’s cinema includes a gallery of strong female roles but perhaps he loves actresses more than women, whom he seems to see – at least in their sexual prime – as archetypes rather than flesh and blood. (This is rarely the problem it might be because he directs first-rate actresses so well.) His male characters are sometimes relatively pallid but they may also be more human. In the case of The Skin I Live In, the protagonist has both iconic and individual substance. Antonio Banderas isn’t obvious casting for a madly obsessed scientist. Yet although the role might seem to require a more dynamic presence, Banderas’s essential placidity is effective and affecting: it gives the story of Robert Ledgard a melancholy, almost tragic heft. The fact that he and Almodóvar used to work together often but haven’t done so for the last two decades has impact too. Fifty-one-year-old Banderas still looks good but he looks his age.
28 August 2011
