I have been wanting to see Pedro Almodovar's THE SKIN I LIVE IN (2011) for a while now. So, when to my great surprise, I saw that it was on BritFlix I jumped on the chance. For those of you who don't know, THE SKIN I LIVE IN is a Spanish psychological thriller about a doctor (Antonio Banderas) who creates an artificial skin that is immune to burning and insect bites and is much tougher than normal human skin (because apparently pig skin is much more sturdy...makes sense!).
What proceeds is a series of events, told in the present, six years in the past, and all the time in between, that continue to get weirder and weirder and more and more confusing. There is random, drug-addled rape, torture, forced sex changes, a creepy sexual-deviant dressed as a tiger who ties up and gags his mother, suicide and copy-cat suicide, mental illness, AND at least 5 minutes of just a close up of a gap-toothed singer crooning Spanish easy-listening.
Don't get me wrong, THE SKIN I LIVE IN is impeccably shot. The use of light and shadow is superb, reflecting the artfulness for which Almodovar has become famous. And, although some performances border on melodramatic/Spanish tele-novella, most of the actors (especially Banderas) are pretty superb. Unfortunately, none of it matters BECAUSE NOTHING MAKES ANY SENSE! Not a single character's motivation (barring the leading lady Elena Anaya) has any explanation or justification. Why is Antonio Banderas having sex with this person when all the preceding events would suggest he should just use one of his seemingly three thousand pistols throughout the house and put and end to his troubles and his strange bedfellow? What is the the point of a random tiger-man harassing the people in Antonio Banderas' house when it leads nowhere and adds nothing to the movie? And why on Earth does it matter that what Banderas is doing in his secret but not-so-secret underground hospital is illegal when clearly everyone knows he's doing it but never say anything?
Basically what I'm saying is that THE SKIN I LIVE IN is a really beautiful and well composed movie that is infuriating because it makes about as much sense as (MAJOR SPOILERS) kidnapping the man who, in a drugged-out stupor, raped your mentally unstable daughter who, for some reason, was allowed to be at a party, taking pills and drinking excessively, when she was clearly still suffering from the effects of seeing her mother kill herself, chloroforming said man and strapping him to an operation table, surgically transforming him into a woman over an undisclosed amount of time, grafting pig-harvested super-skin onto his/her body, AND THEN USING SAID MAN/WOMAN AS YOUR MISTRESS!!
But hey, maybe I just lost something in translation, right?
