Plastic surgeon Robert Ledgard (Antonio Banderas) stands in silhouette. From behind a lectern, harsh spotlights highlight his olive complexion, an angelic halo outlining the Spaniard's finely tailored suit. A hall of curious colleagues sit in wonderment, their gaze judging yet eager. The forerunning physician announces, "Our face identifies us." It depicts the race to which we belong, our emotive states, and as the film's title suggests, fails to reveal what lies beneath the surface. In a monumental breakthrough, Robert reveals that he has synthetically manufactured a more perfect form of human skin, implying an end to deformation in various forms.
Robert is an artist, a sculptor, and his crowning work-of-art more resembles life than corporeal imitation. In fact, Robert animates his coveted creation--the perfect feminine specimen, her skin fire-repellent and impervious to blemish. She rests imprisoned in Robert's palatial estate, which also doubles as his laboratory. The scalpel-toting doctor keeps the most beautiful woman in the world, Vera (Elena Anaya), under lock and key; and in doing so, he treats her with admiring care. As she lay in repose reading a book--encased in a protective, flesh-tone body suit and quarantined in her room--the leering Robert watches through a surveillance camera. Vera's projected countenance, porcelain and pristine, fills a wall-sized digital screen. Robert falls still, mesmerized from an adjacent room, as if he could reach out and touch his breathing specimen. The cold doctor--who since his wife's death has spent his waking hours distancing himself from human connection--bristles in titillation.
His latest excursion into the male gaze--as seen through the eyes of a beleaguered beauty--Almodóvar's The Skin I Live In (according to the title card, he has dropped the 'Pedro') is another iteration in a long line of films in which plush and florid aesthetics are perfectly rendered through form and content. Voyeurism runs rampant, and women must fend for themselves in the face of male fetishization and moral bankruptcy. If all this sounds too heady or feminist, rest assured: Almodóvar is a master of narrative. Often compared to Alfred Hitchcock, the Spanish director knows how to playfully infuse color, psychological intrigue, and perversion into winning cinematic concoctions. However unlike his recent efforts--2006's Volver immediately comes to mind--The Skin I Live In does not possess, or at any point sustain, emotional resonance. It's as if Almodóvar, wielder of exotic palettes, has intentionally stripped the warmly textured reds from of previous efforts, and in The Skin I Live In, substituted them with a fog of grey; the director and mad scientist act in tandem, doing everything in their power to assert themselves as clinical practitioners of detachment. Within the film's prosthetic exterior--flashbacks explaining Dr. Ledgard's traumatic past and Vera's shocking physical transformation--the story at the film's core bubbles with carnality. But the picture feels so remote, an island unto (and fascinated in) itself. It's rare and rather strange when we admire and take pleasure in a film for its formalistic prowess only to be unaffected by the time credits roll.
A twisted, comic meditation on gender identity, our interior versus exterior lives, and the preposterousness of lust gone awry, The Skin I Live In hangs on flabby limbs when compared to Almodóvar's previous work. Yet it is unfair to judge the Spanish director solely under the narrow microscope of his own work. So adept with his camera, Almodóvar knows how to treat even the most slight of thrillers--Dr. Frankenstein meets Nip/Tuck--with bountiful imagery and dexterous precision. Though this seems a more superficial entry in Almodóvar's cannon--a little too much surface, not enough carnal nourishment--The Skin I Live In ultimately contains more than enough rousing oddities to keep your attention. Marvel at its strangeness. There's plenty of gore and eroticism to insert itself into your memory.
