The Skin I Live In

Antonio Banderas plays a Madrid plastic surgeon, wealthy, cultured and respected; he gives brilliant lectures and research papers on advances in face-transplant surgery. Daringly, heretically, he advocates transgenic treatments from animals to toughen the skin.

In his palatial home, he has a private operating theatre where he carries out experimental work on Vera, a beautiful woman he keeps prisoner, who is dressed only in a clinging gauzy, flesh-toned material and whose skin has an unnaturally smooth, flawless look. She appears to submit ecstatically to her imprisonment, but this is finally to be the cause of madness and violence.

The Skin I Live In is adapted from the 2003 novel Mygale (Tarantula) by Thierry Jonquet, but clearly Almodóvar has taken something from Georges Franju's 1960 film Eyes Without a Face and possibly also Alejandro Amenábar's Open Your Eyes from 1997. It is also conceivable that he wants us to think of Evelyn Waugh's story Love Among the Ruins.

But influences and allusions are almost beside the point, given the fact that almost every scene, every shot, must remind you of every other Almodóvar picture. As ever, it is sleek and stylishly furnished, sensually charged with richness and colour, and splashes and gashes of red. There is a surging Hitchcockian orchestral score and a breathless sense of imminent violence: handguns are coolly disclosed in desk-drawers and expensive ladies' handbags; crime scenes are established in stunning overhead shots.

As in many of his films, family secrets are revealed through lengthy flashbacks – something forbidden to contemporary Hollywood screenwriters. There is the doppelganger motif, and the younger guy who likes partying and drugs; there are staircase scenes and scenes in which a middle-aged man watches the object of his desire, enraptured, on a large screen. And perhaps most startling, and most characteristic of all, there is Almodóvar's great theme of transsexual identity, which speaks of passion, fantasy and escape. The director himself, in various masks and guises, is present in all of this.

For those who would like Almodóvar to do something radical – and this was rather how this movie had been misleadingly billed here in Cannes – then The Skin I Live In might try the patience. But I can only say that it kept me gripped from first to last. The sheer muscular confidence of Almodóvar's film-making language gives it force, and co-exists with a dancer's elegance and grace. Without this, the story could look strained and farcical. Instead, its bizarre passions are compelling. Almodóvar brings something hypnotic to the surgery-porn aesthetic of his operating theatre of cruelty: the latex, the scrubs, the cold steel, the exquisite yet appalling contrast between wounds and young flesh. It is twisted and mad, and its choreography and self-possession are superb.

Source : http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2011/may/19/cannes-2011-film-festival-pedro-almodovar-review