Few filmmakers portray passions as vividly as Pedro Almodovar. With a lush and vibrant visual style and heavy and operatic themes running its narratives, his movies are dense and melodramatic while they juggle between a morbid fascination and heartfelt emotions. “The Skin I Live In” takes a detour into the queasy and perverse while still maintaining his usual motifs of lust and obsession. It performs a risky high-wire act in telling its revenge story (it’s wise to avoid spoilers beforehand, especially with a shocking revelation in its final act).
The film is fragmented in dissociative scenes of underlying resonance giving the audience pieces of information that seem to confuse early on but intrigue us throughout. Almodovar also does something quite interesting in revealing snippets of back story to the audience without sharing it between the characters.
Antonio Banderas plays a brilliant plastic surgeon who lives in a mansion whilst keeping a young woman who, for some unknown reason, remains his captive (she is played by the lovely Elena Anaya). As the film reveals flashbacks of characters we haven’t met yet we begin to find ourselves adrift en Almodovar’s messy narrative game but, in a strange way, hooked on the possibilities and outcomes of its diabolical predicaments.
“The Skin I Live In” is a fascinating experiment that holds an eerie power. It’s a film that’s rough around its edges, cool and glossy on the surface but raw and ugly on its center. It’s an uncomfortable and unforgettable psychological thriller that belongs in my top ten movies of 2011.
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