Layers of Fear: Almodovar's 'The Skin I Live In' Provokes and Terrifies (The Daily)
October 14, 2011
At first, it seems like another beautiful Pedro Almodovar movie. Incredibly lush palette. Gorgeous young actors. Lustrous costumes that make Alexander McQueen look like a sportswear designer. A wonderfully implausible melodramatic plot that draws on the films of Douglas Sirk.
But "The Skin I Live in" is a deep and deeply disturbing film. It uses sumptuous colors and kitschy shenanigans to probe the limits of personality, gender and science. The gravity of the film's preoccupations, under all its layers of histrionics and beauty, puts it near the first rank of Almodovar movies -- somewhere between the giggling submissiveness of his 1990 film "Tie Me Up, Tie Me Down" and 2006's brilliant "Volver."
Antonio Banderas plays a controlling plastic surgeon who has gone mad from grief. His passion and insanity have led him to create a synthetic skin and perform dozens of surgeries on a beautiful young woman, played by Elena Anaya. She is now trapped in his house that doubles as a medical facility, being guarded by his faithful housekeeper, who has her own secrets.
The plot of "The Skin I Live in" resembles that of Nathaniel Hawthorne's classic short story "The Birth-Mark," in which a doctor performs a number of surgeries on his wife to remove her beauty mark, which he believes is an unsightly blemish, harming her in the process. And the film does have a literary lineage -- it's based on Thierry Jonquet's novel "Tarantula."
Its theme is scientists' (particularly males') obsession with perfection and willingness to use the tools at their disposal to achieve it. As the film progresses, the scientist's plan for this young person is revealed as even more unsettling than it at first seemed.
One can laugh off these plot points as the fancies of a man who has watched too many 1950s B movies: the beautiful patient, the illegitimate son and brothers, the crazy daughter, the disfigured wife -- and, for a more modern touch, a sex change.
Almodovar's grasp of color theory, his crack director of photography and all the very generous Spanish arts funding that probably went into this film's production budget make it so much more than that. "The Skin I Live in," like the best works of psychological horror, is really about how an individual's body and mind can be mutilated and erased by another person.
Films like "The Skin I Live in" do nothing less than touch on the fundamental fear of the mechanical age: that modern life will replace what we see as humanness through contagion or science itself. Meanwhile, we happen to live in a period in which the branches of science, from experimentation and genetic research to behavioral evolution and neuroscience, are typically perceived to be panaceas, even in literature, journalism and art. Science in all its forms is now often presumed to offer the sort of closure and finality that more individualistic, humanistic modes of inquiry cannot.
In its anti-scientific outlook, "The Skin I Live in" resembles another 2011 film, "Rise of the Planet of the Apes." These are two big films that use pulpy storytelling and campy antics to attack the rule of science (really, scientism) in contemporary life. Both films quote the 1950s and '60s American B-film trope of the crazed evil scientist with abandon.
Under the kooky antics and voluptuous imagery of "The Skin I Live in," a serious argument unspools. It makes sense that Almodovar, one of the few great directors alive, would be the one to make it.