An Almodovar film is a special thing. They exist outside the spectrum of normal story telling. Always riveting and unexpected, they are pieces constructed of so many layers, that they keep giving and giving with each revisit.
His latest, The Skin I Live In, is not the type of film Almodovar, famously championed as a director for women since his 1988 film Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, has become famous for. It comes from a much more sinister place. It’s a film about a man, and as the writer/director himself attests, his films to do with men always seem to take place in a darker and crueler world.
Antonio Banderas stars as Robert, a plastic surgeon plagued by the death of his wife and daughter. In his home is Vera, (Elena Anaya), a patient/prisoner on whom he experiments to develop a synthetic skin and Marilia (a brilliant Marisa Paredes), the servant that has raised him from infancy. All it takes is these three characters for Almodovar to create a tangled web of deceit and long kept secrets. It is a disservice to divulge too much, as the true joy of The Skin I Live In is in arriving to conclusions that you thought maybe were true, but are still as shocking when confirmed.
For those who are only familiar with Banderas’ English language work, his performance as Robert will come as a surprise, in his native Spain the actor easily sheds the stereotypes Hollywood has burdened him with. Here Banderas is masterful, both convincingly sinister and crazed, and most importantly, human. It’s this layer of humanity to the worst of his characters that separates Almodovar from the legion of story tellers in the world today.
Every character has a mean streak the runs deep to their cores, as much a part of them as their best intentions. It’s a device that works well not only for character development, but for the development of plot and story as well.
The Skin I Live In asks us to make distinctions. Are right and wrong clearly delineated choices and where does righteous revenge give way to lunacy? Long after the film’s end you find yourself ruminating on it all, even knowing that really isn’t the point at all. There is no right answer; the film’s motives are as multifaceted as humanity’s.