★★★★
This is a movie I liked a lot. I rediscovered everything I like about Almodovar here, and he has it all under more control than he sometimes has recently.
I watched The Skin I Live In as something like a Douglas Sirk melodrama, but one that’s incredibly magnified and distorted through a gay perspective. In Sirk’s Magnificent Obsession, for example, a playboy has a boat accident that results in an innocent woman’s blindness. The playboy then becomes a brain surgeon and cures the woman. The Skin I Live In also starts with an initiation accident, but the film then goes off in a series of ridiculously unlikely consequences as the wife commits suicide, the daughter has a mental breakdown and is raped, and the father kidnaps the rapist and transforms the rapist’s gender and appearance to resemble that of his lost wife. And the transgendered rapist is then raped by the father’s hitherto unknown brother. Almodovar’s film is clearly in the same line of melodrama as Sirk's, but Skin I Live In intensifies the already-intense melodrama tone and adds a dollop of interest in gender identity and even horror.
And the film is peppered through with themes that Almodovar regularly returns to – identity, sexuality, mothers, the hidden. There are hidden identities and identities that change. Mothers try to protect their sons but become involved as agents in the spiraling action. There are gay relationships and straight relationships, but that becomes confused as Vincente becomes Vera and is involved with the two brothers, Roberto and Zeca, in different ways. The Skin I Live In doubles characters and actions to create a wonderfully complicated mix of themes and characters.
And as Almodovar keeps all the characters and stories in balance, he does so by creating striking images of beauty and surprise. One of the more surprising images occurs as a man in a tiger outfit walks up to the estate, rings the bell and is admitted by Marilia. It’s carnival, and Zeca is using the festival to travel in disguise, but the scene is visually striking until we get that information. Similarly, the interior of the Legard mansion is beautiful, an interior out of Sirk. The images here are yet another element of the pleasure this film gives.
It’s great to see Almodovar working at the peak of his powers again in a film like this. It’s a pleasure to watch a master do what he does so well.
