The Skin I Live In (La Piel Que Habito): Cannes 2011 Review

The Bottom Line

Almod?var tries his hand at science fiction of a sort, but never abandons his favored themes of identity, anxiety and betrayal.

Venue:

Cannes Film Festival, Competition (Sony Pictures Classics)

Cast:

Antonio Banderas, Elena Anaya, Marisa Paredes, Jan Cornet

Director:

Pedro Almod?var

Screenwriters:

Agustin Almod?var, Pedro Almod?var

CANNES -- As implausible as it might seem, the cinema world of Pedro Almod?var just got stranger in The Skin I Live In (La Piel Que Habito). Along with such usual Almod?var obsessions as betrayal, anxiety, loneliness, sexual identity and death, the Spanish director has added a science-fiction element that verges on horror. But like many lab experiments, this melodramatic hybrid makes for an unstable fusion. Only someone as talented as Almod?var could have mixed such elements without blowing up an entire movie.

With Antonio Banderas returning to the fold to play the mad-scientist protagonist, Sony Pictures Classics is assured that more than the Almod?var faithful will show up for its North American release. Reactions will vary, as it?s hard to tell just how much of this is being delivered with tongue-in-cheek panache or how emotionally invested the auteur is in his Dr. Frankenstein character.

That doctor would be Banderas? character, Dr. Robert Ledgard, an eminent plastic surgeon and university researcher. As befits his profession, Robert looks like he stepped out of the pages GQ. Yet his face conveys a sense of dark purpose. And he works out of a clinic in his own suburban, highly isolated and secure compound outside Toledo.

He presents colleagues with a paper indicating he has been researching the creation of a new and better, stronger skin that considerably bends the boundaries of bioethics. The audience by this point is well aware that confined within his mansion is a young woman, Vera (Elena Anaya), who is being molded ? there is no other word for it ? to the doctor?s specific requirements. And that would be to largely resemble his late wife, who was burned beyond recognition in a car crash and chose to die rather than to live in such ruined skin.

Vera wears a skin-colored body stocking like a second skin and spends much of the time in a series of yoga positions. These help her to reach an inner core of selfhood the doctor can never touch.

Then a man in a tiger costume (Roberto Alamo) breaks into the house. He?s in tiger skin because it?s Carnival time, but you suspect Almod?var would have found any excuse to put him into that costume to achieve the image of a tiger on the prowl for Vera.

There is first a sexual and then a violent encounter, which leads to revelations about the relationship between the doctor and the tiger-man, and between the men and Robert?s housekeeper (Marisa Paredes). Then the movie flashes back six years, which introduces two more characters, Robert?s daughter (Blanca Su?rez) and a local youth (Jan Cornet) who sets his sights on the young, emotionally fragile woman while he is high on pills at a party.

To describe any further the story, written by Agustin and Pedro Almod?var from a novel by Thierry Jonquet, would spoil several surprises. While Almod?var is clearly rummaging through old films and film genres that by his own admission include Bu?uel, Hitchcock, Lang and Franju as well as Hammer horror and Dario Argento kitsch, he mostly is going after the theme of identity. As the old saying goes, beauty is only skin deep, to which Almod?var adds that skin can only encase one?s identity or soul. For the skin can change, the soul cannot.

Throughout the movie there are references to the French-born American artist and sculpture Louise Bourgeois? ? Vera looks through a book of her art ? and the story picks up many of sculpture?s themes revolving around the human body and its need for nurturing in a hostile world and about the death or exorcism of the father figure.

For Robert is both a father figure and Frankenstein creator who seeks to dominate all women and eliminate male rivals. Yet Almod?var treats him as ?mad? and therefore not fully responsible for his villainy. He is the product of a twisted family and household. The women in his life ? his wife, daughter and the guinea pig? ? all suffer because he has suffered. So Almod?var?s embrace of his crazed characters is a tender one, full of passion and comic glee.

The film?s design, costumes and music, especially Alberto Iglesias? music, present a lushly beautiful setting, which is nonetheless a prison and house of horror. Almod?var pumps his movie full of deadly earnestness and heady emotions. There are well-timed laughs that lessen the melodrama and underscore that Almod?var remains ever a prankster. No one is better at tying imagery to emotions, yet even Almod?var realizes that, as Hitchcock would say, ?It?s only a movie, Ingrid.?

Venue: Cannes Film Festival, Competition (Sony Pictures Classics)
Sales: Filmation Entertainment
Production companies: El Deseo D.A., S.L.U.
Cast: Antonio Banderas, Elena Anaya, Marisa Paredes, Jan Cornet, Roberto Alamo, Blanca Su?rez, Eduard Fern?dez
Director: Pedro Almod?var
Screenwriters: Agustin Almod?var, Pedro Almod?var
Based on a novel by: Thierry Jonquet
Producers: Agustin Almod?var, Esther Garcia
Director of photography: Jos? Luis Alcaine
Production designer: Antxon G?mez
Music: Alberto Iglesias
Costume designer: Paco Delgado, with the collaboration of Jean-Paul Gaultier
Editor: Jos? Salcedo
No rating, 116 minutes

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/thr/reviews/film/~3/hfwrnxpboh8/skin-i-live-la-piel-190230

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