KO Film Review- The Skin I Live In
The Thrilling Discomfortof The Skin I Live In (Le Piel Que Habito) Pedro Almodovar (2011)
Most brilliant people have quirks, Pedro Almodovar’s direction in The Skin I Live In is no exception. A film about a plastic surgeon, obsessed with the memory of his wife who commited suicide. Written and directed by Almodovar, it makes you wonder where these twisted ideas of brilliance are born. Almodovar adapted the story and wrote The Skin I Live In based on the novel Tarantula by Thierry Jonquet.
In many of Almodovar’s films, the director attempts to relate in some ways with the female perspective, but none deal with this perspective quite the same way as The Skin I Live In. This film was nominated for the Palme d’Or at Cannes Film Festival this year (2011), screened at TIFF and also here in Calgary at CIFF. The film stars Antonio Banderas who is a veteran actor in Almodovar films, having worked together 21 years prior in the film Tie Me Up Tie Me Down(1990). In The Skin I Live In Banderas plays Doctor Robert Ledgard, the limitless plastic surgeon lamenting over the death of his deceased wife and tries to replicate her on the surface of another person’s body for revenge of the rape of his daughter. Genius and experimental in his work, his approach at creation, or rather recreation of human flesh, exposes his power driven god-like approach to modern medicine.
This film deals with contemporary issues of gender identification, which have never been addressed in Almodovar’s previous works. Gender identity is a current topic in popular culture and has become increasing popular because of the plight for equality of LGBT people in Western society. Aside from gender identity as a social issue, the character of Vincente played by Jan Cornet, was a boy who worked in his mother’s consignment store and loved to work with textiles. He rode a motorcycle and experimented with pills. He wasn’t eluded as being the most masculine of characters. Vincente’s transformation into Vera Cruz, this ultra feminine and delicate character seemed so well embraced by the character after the sexual reassignment surgery he under went. The transformation of genders by the character emphasizes the power shift from male to female, and the subsequent domination of the masculine gender by Dr. Ledgard, Banderas’ character who confines, penetrates and admires Vera Cruz as a woman in a possessive sexual nature.
The complex narrative of this film, which Almodovar is infamous for, is sorted out through the many beautiful flashbacks, which help the audience empathsize with the Psychopath character Banderas play as Dr. Ledgard. But however beautiful, the discomfort is inevitable as you watch many uncomfortable situations dealing with rape from a boy to a girl, a man to a boy and over again.
Although this film would be classified in the genres of Horror or Psychological Thrillers, it deals with Gender, Power, Tragedy and Love, which make’s it so much more than you expect from a Festival Film.
