‘The Skin I live in’ is immersed in the lush visual lexicon that we have come to expect from the Spanish auteur Pedro Almodovar. The cinematography is voluptuous, vibrant and has a striking formalism that borrows heavily from Hitchcock. The production design is taut and offers a myriad of scenes that are visually compelling, though they lack the authentic emotional core that is at the heart of Almodovar’s previous films.
The film begins in the stately mansion of Dr. Robert Ledgard (Antonio Banderas); a brilliant plastic surgeon who possesses an obsessive quiet intensity and is working on creating a new experimental skin that protects its wearer from external dangers. The reason for the skin’s creation and the subsequent ramifications is at the heart of this convoluted story. Robert’s lack of scruples and amorality cause him to test his skin over a period of six years on an unwilling captive. It is the captive who threads the movie’s three parts. Vera is that captive and she was not who she is after Dr. Ledgard’s extensive experiments. We get to understand how Vera came into Dr. Ledgard’s lair through a flashback that takes us to a fateful night concerning his daughter Bianca’s relationship with a young man. Giving away too much would destroy the essential mystery of the film but it is the relationships between these four people that define the web of desire that is constructed.
There were several beautiful sequences like the opening voyeuristic shots of Vera moving from one yoga contortion to the next, inside a flexible nude bodysuit, or the party sequence that includes a performance from the Spanish flamenco singer, Buika. ‘The Skin I live in’ is a film about desire gone wrong and inevitably ends up tangling itself in its own web but it is a beautiful web nonetheless.
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