The Skin I Live In

Saw The Skin I Live In. I think I'm going to have to see everything Almodóvar has done. His movies are amazing. This one was about a doctor whose specialty is cosmetic surgery. He keeps a woman in a body-suit captive in his house. She does yoga and stares enigmatically into the security cameras he has trained on her, her face blown up to the size of a man on his big-screen TV. We know this woman resembles his wife but is not his wife. We see that she has skin which repulses mosquitoes and is not burnt by acetylene torches. Who this woman is is the central mystery of this film. It is not given to fantasy, so it's unlikely she is an alien or an angel. Vampires are brought up, but she is not that either.

Almodóvar has an amazing talent for telling an entirely cohesive story and then re-telling it in such a way that it flips the story on its head. This film starts with a man in a tiger-print morph suit breaking into the doctor's house and into the captive woman's room. He rapes her but is caught by the doctor who shoots him. Later, we see the woman watching a cheetah devour a gazelle on TV. She lays down to sleep with the doctor and then we flash back to six years ago and everything is recontextualized. I don't want to give anything away but the film succeeded in shocking me, which is no mean feat. Almodóvar's films have this slow, deliberate feel to them, reminiscent of much more milquetoast directors. Unlike Lynch or Guilliam, he does not exoticise his fascinations. He gives no warning signs that madness lurks ahead and it is therefore all the more disarming and bewildering.

Almodóvar has a fascination with transsexuals. This shows up in the film in the flash-back. There is a heavy theme of skins and self-image which the transsexual thing feeds nicely into. We meet a character who literally does not feel at home in their skin, whose self-image is at odds with their actual body's. The captive woman is wearing a body-suit, the doctor's home is decorated with surrealist and impressionist nude paintings, his captive layers fabric skins onto humanoid clay sculptures, her yoga-balls all have brown, patch-work skins sewn on them, even the rapist is wearing a second-skin, patterned like the skin of a tiger. Amazingly thorough!

I'm still kind of reeling from the film. I really liked it. I've read that Almodóvar is sort of a slave to his obsessions (transsexuals, homosexuality, mothers (there two in this film, both with complex relationships with their children,) and presumably others which I am unaware of.) Of his films I've seen, they're sort of hit or miss. His obsessions are his own and sometimes he does not strain to keep us interested in them, along with him. This film, however, was a hit for me. Good show, man!