vinylisheavy:

Another Pedro Almodóvar movie means another couple hours spent not looking away from some vulgar wreckage dressed up in delicious high fashions. It also means outstanding technique, vibrant colors, sex, meticulous plotting, a series of quotes or homages (doesn’t matter which) and everything perverted about cinema that people like to say Hitchcock started. The Skin I Live In is ostensibly a Mad Scientist melodrama complete with a yoga fanatic Frankenstein Bride. Our grief-stricken Dr. Ledgard (Antonio Banderas burns) plays warden to his prisoner-patient Vera (Elena Anaya is maybe flawless), whom he’s clad in a second skin neck to tiptoe to protect the first skin he’s beta-testing live on her pliant and perfect body. His compound-house adorned by screens and paintings alike, all eyes on feminine curves, the film appears to be strictly about projection and voyeurism at first; but as cinematic as the film is, with all that looking and being looked at in sets that have TV sets as drapery, it’s got more on its mind than just the movies.

Sculpture is key (see those Bourgeois lumps as sad faces without faces, bruised bodies of hurt that reflect their maker), as is fashion (which might be an offspring of sculpture to some, as attendance at that Met show of McQueen might attest), gender, and, as ties it all together, the body. Most specifically, Anaya’s body, which happens to be on perpetual display in one state of dress or distress or another throughout. Though he’s no Cronenberg, Almodóvar tries out his own version of body horror to rend some new ideas about the construction of gender (how you see yourself as much as how the world does and how those interact), and how men see women (as they want to) inside an outrageous yarn that only gets wackier as it unravels in circles until it procedes again to the finish.

Color me seduced by Almodóvar’s fetishistic style and manipulated by his baiting narrative, but the mysteries’ reveals rapt me right up, the story serving its aim to complicate spectators’ sympathies. The stakes are primal, if cartoonish (or soft Sci-Fi): Dr. Ledgrad’s priggish attempts to make a new human skin, ostensibly to protect it from burns and bug bites alike, is akin to building a new kind of mummy, a body blocked from everything in the world (including life). But the skin we all live in, the skin Ledgrad’d like to escape or replace, is forever at two purposes at once as a screen against and for the world. The key is he’s not doing it to himself but this poor Vera, making a doll of her the way a director makes puppets of his actors, which only further screws up our relation to every evil force at play inside this house of locked doors and screens that are passages to nowhere but further loops of surveillance. A proper analysis of the film’s themes, however familiar in the Almodóvar body of work, is as impossible to encapsulate in a review as the final scene’s reveal is to countenance (you get the sense even Almodóvar can’t, trying to hold himself back from bawling) without spoiling just about everything powerful that leads to a fade out that says plenty: all stories are impossible realities from the start.

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(Danny asked me for a quick graf à la Fernando but I’m no Fernando and some revisions saw it explode into this. But instead of just killing it I thought I’d put it here since Danny’s right: “it’s somewhere between a review, a journal entry and an article.” And I sure as shit don’t want to spend any more time on it. Point is: learn less about the movie and go see it. It may be a film maudit to be rediscovered in time.)

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Don’t read it ‘til you see the film, but here’s a more in-depth look from Film Quarterly at the Foucault-surveillance and Freud-uncanny aspects that I dug and didn’t quite get to express above.

New Almodovar sounds sick.