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Movie Review: 'The Skin I Live In'

By Bill Wine
KYW Newsradio 1060

Labeling a Pedro Almodóvar movie "his weirdest work yet" sounds preposterous.  He is, after all, one of our quirkiest and most idiosyncratic filmmakers.

Yet that's the skinny on the Spanish writer-director's The Skin I Live In, a kinky, twisted fairy tale for grownups which becomes an immediate contender for that particular distinction.

The Skin I Live In is a pulpy horror film of sorts, one in a Frankenstein-like science fiction vein.   But it's not designed to scare or frighten or amaze as much as to quietly shock you and creep you out and disturb you and make you squirm.

2½
(2½ stars out of 4)

All of which it does.

Antonia Banderas stars as Robert Ledgard, a brilliant plastic surgeon doing medical research at his lavish estate in suburban Toledo, Spain, who has developed a synthetic skin that can withstand any kind of damage.  It will not, for example, burn.

Ledgard is motivated by the fact that his beloved wife was burned in a car accident twelve years ago and took her own life because of the way she subsequently looked.

Although he claims to his colleagues and acquaintances that he has tested it only on mice, which is legal, we know better: he is holding a young woman (Elena Anaya) captive and using her as his guinea pig, which is decidedly not legal, to say the least.

What's going on? Well, let's just say that this film gives a whole new meaning to the word "makeover."

Review continues below photo...

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To give you any more details would be unfair to the unpredictable turns the narrative takes, some of them teetering on outright outrageousness.  They're best preserved until they're sprung on the audience.

The prolific Almodóvar (Broken Embraces, Talk To Her, Volver, All About My Mother) remains a master imagist:  his film is nothing if not visually arresting, with vibrant colors and gliding camera moves holding us transfixed.

And he's a sly storyteller: his flashback-heavy screenplay (loosely based on the novel Tarantula, by Thierry Jonquet) touches on several abiding Almodóvar themes such as sexual identity, deceitful lies, family bonds, obsessiveness, and our preoccupation with surface beauty, even as it defies generic expectations.

But he stretches the perversity-quotient level to such a degree that we're distracted by the sheer grotesqueness of several of the revelations.  Don't be surprised if you hear yourself mutter "you have got be kidding" when the Big Reveal occurs in Act III.  You'll admire Almodóvar's nerve even if and as you ridicule his central conceit.

It's difficult to disagree with accusations that the plot tumbles over the top in the late going as Almodóvar reaches for the "far" in farfetched, but only a world-class director could even attempt to pull off this tricky a tone.

Banderas, starring in an Almodóvar film for the first time in more than twenty years (since Tie Me Up! Tie My Down!, in 1990), isn't exactly stretched by the role, but he does contribute an effectively charismatic star turn as the relentless obsessive that recalls both James Stewart and Cary Grant in their respective roles in Hitchcock's Vertigo and North by Northwest.

So we'll graft 2½ stars out of 4 for the monumentally macabre melodrama, The Skin I Live In, as audacious auteur Pedro Almodóvar performs cosmetic surgery on our expectations and once again manages to get under our skin.

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