The Skin I Live In (La piel que habito) is undoubtedly Pedro Almodóvar’s most dramatic and disturbing film to date. Based on Thierry Jonquet’s novel Mygale and fitting well within the tradition of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Birthmark and other tales in which a mad scientist is physically, emotionally or symbolically destroyed by his own creation, Almodóvar’s latest film tells the frightening story of a talented surgeon and medical researcher who is on the quest to cultivate strong, practically undestroyable skin, skin that is resistant to malaria or burns.
Dr. Robert Ledgard (played by Antonio Banderas), whose wife killed herself after being severely burned in a car accident, eventually succeeds at his task by injecting human skin cells with the genetic material of a pig to create what he considers “the best skin in the world.” Of course, in order to test and develop this sort of illegal transgenetic technology, Dr. Ledgard requires a patient, Vera (played by Elena Anaya). For the greater part of the film, Vera’s identity remains a mystery. Trapped in a comfortable room in Dr. Ledgard’s castle, she reads, does yoga, makes sculptures and appears to grow more and more beautiful each day. The viewer, who cannot help but be seduced by the beautiful captive, is sickeningly and disturbingly surprised when the truth of Vera’s identity and the key to Almodóvar’s twisted story is finally revealed.
Unlike what the film’s title may evoke, The Skin I Live In is in no way about female vanity or plastic surgery. Like many of Almodóvar’s films, it deals with false appearances, sex, and the transitory or performed nature of gender. There are echoes of Talk To Her (Hable con ella): the villain/caretaker falls in love with his patient and uses his position of power to take advantage of her. Almodóvar returns as well to his exploration of complicated familial relationships, as in All About My Mother (Todo sobre mi madre) and Volver: Dr. Ledgard’s maid is also his mother, and a few minutes into the film he murders the brother he never knew he had. This time, however, Almodóvar really reaches the limits of morality in portraying medical treatment and beautification as a kind of torture, selfishly enacted by Dr. Ledgard on Vera. It’s a gross and hugely unethical revenge.
The Skin I Live In, with its sickening lab experiments and soap opera dramatics, is a beautifully shot sci-fi dystopia (the film is set in the very close future of 2012) that borders on horror. Almodóvar’s characteristically quirky comic relief is absent from the film and as a result, the atmosphere is constantly tense, uneasy, and even overwhelmingly nervous. Although I can’t say that I liked this film—I think that’s beside the point—I do recommend it to those who are willing to brave the obsessions of a surgeon unafraid to transgress all the basic principals of bioethics.
Defending his research to a colleague who suspects he falsely claimed to be only experimenting on mice, Dr. Ledgard casually says something to the effect of “If we already [genetically modify] food, animals and plants, why not also humans?” In Almodóvar’s imagination, the consequences of this kind of thinking are terrifying.
Comments