Showing @ Filmhouse, Edinburgh until Thu 15 Sep
Pedro Almodóvar offers up his newest exploration of power and identity borne out of fatalistic melodrama in The Skin I Live In. In typical Almodóvarian style, the film’s cinematic beauty and elegance are what mask the true social dysfunctions in a society with anomalous sexual practices and psychosocial disorders. After formulating a type of synthetic skin, surgeon Robert Ledgard (Antonio Banderas) performs a dangerous procedure known as transgenesis on his captive subject Vera (Elena Anaya). Struggling to accept personal tragedies which riddle his history, Ledgard fuses his medical skills with a surreal search for sexual dominance while experimenting with the forms of power granted by such pioneering treatment.
Featuring the same forensic approach to sex and relationships as used in Talk To Her, the film’s heavy reliance on fatalism and sentimentalism are what maybe slightly let it down; a matter of taste which can either feel overcooked or intentional. Seething classical interludes motor the action, paralleling the bizarre grandeur of Ledgard’s talent and ambition, a similarity which is intensified by dramatic crescendos of eroticism and brutality. Invariably however, these intensities are glossed over in favour of the psychological oddities which create them; the need for reciprocal monogamy, sexual justice and social revenge. This means the film is such a huge mixing pot of ideas it can sometimes be difficult to hold on to one, yet each theme is orchestrated with true directorial finesse, introduced and layered on top of each other to compliment a warped view of authority. As Ledgard carries out his unethical procedures, his obsession with the human form mirrors Almodóvar’s examination of the conditions which underpin our taboos, and the film is itself a masterfully distorted account of how desire and punishment can blur into one another with almost poetic grace.