Pedro Almodovar's "The Skin I Live In" is enticingly thrilling, yet mystifyingly convoluted. Be patient — the shock is worth the wait.
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It is challenging to categorize Almodovar's films; they are vibrantly colorful and enjoyably melodramatic, but they ceaselessly surprise with bizarre and fascinating twists. In Almodovar's most recent film "The Skin I Live In," Antonio Banderas plays an esteemed plastic surgeon who becomes obsessed with inventing a new skin for his horrifically burned wife. While this sounds odd in itself, Almodovar — as expected — weaves in other peculiar characters, including a nymphomaniac dressed as a tiger and the doctor's entrancingly beautiful test patient. For Almodovar, the shock lies deep within the convoluted storyline.
Banderas plays Dr. Robert Ledgard, who has just achieved success with his newly invented prosthetic human skin — one that is radically resistant to outside forces but also highly sensitive to touch. He lives in a fabulous Spanish mansion with an elaborate medical lab. Other residents of the mansion include Marilla (Marisa Paredes), an older servant, and Vera, a stunning girl who is seemingly held captive in a bedroom.
The relationship between Robert and Vera is unaccountably strange and uncomfortable. He comes home from work, goes into his office and turns on a full, wall-length television, broadcasting a live feed from Vera's bedroom. He watches her as she lies naked on her bed. He brings a pipe of opium to her bedroom, then quickly and nervously slinks past her as she entices him. We aren't told who she is or what she is doing in his home — this is the absurd nature of Almodovar films that we must come to accept — when suddenly Marilla's lecherous, criminal son arrives, dressed in a velvet tiger costume. Only after some further complications (by which point some viewers will already have lost patience) is any backstory given at all.
Watching the first half of "The Skin I Live In" makes you feel like a lost child on the way to a candy store — you know the grand conclusion will come, but the route is unfamiliar and confusing. It's difficult to describe the plot — the film spends a great deal of time establishing its bizarre tone. But patience is a virtue, and for this film, it's well worth it.
In the end, Almodovar delivers. Although he drags the audience through a seemingly disjointed story, three parts enthralling, one part frustrating, he makes up for it with the most staggering, inconceivable twist imaginable. The degree of the twist's shocking absurdity is unprecedented and yet so typical of Almodovar, the master of convoluted concealment.
The first hour of frustration is excused once Almodovar finally dunks us into the water (having teased us with small droplets throughout). Banderas remains thrillingly mysterious, emanating an almost pitiful fierceness that makes him impossible to purely love or hate. Although "The Skin I Live In" is not his best work, Almodovar fully satisfies with a shocking, unparalleled story about the lengths to which one will go for creation, vengeance and love.
