For the
sake of not having to write the same intro a million
different ways throughout the rest of time, just know that
this column avoids the overly long and sometimes dull
process of full film reviews and instead opts to break
things down based on what I thought going in, what happened
while I was there and what I learned at the end of it all.
Thanks for reading!
The
Breakdown - The Skin I Live In
The Impression:
A new film by Pedro Almodovar, one of the masters of world
cinema, the man behind films like Bad Education,
Women On The Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, All About
My Mother and you’re asking me what my impression might
be? Excited. Really, really excited.
The Reality:
The Skin I Live In is easily the strangest film I’ve
personally seen from Pedro Almodovar, a hodge-podge of body
horror, mystery, and darkly humorous thriller that somehow
manages to succeed. Antonio Banderas plays Robert Ledgard, a
brilliant plastic surgeon who’s spent the last decades of
his life trying to discover a new form of skin that might’ve
helped to cure his now dead wife. He also has a girl
imprisoned in his upstairs. One who wears strange body suits
and is fed through an electronically locked dumbwaiter. And
then a lot more happens, none of it suitable for me to
reveal without dispelling even a tiny bit of the fucked-up
magic of this latest film. It touches, masterfully, on all
of the themes of an Almodovar film but somehow manages to be
just a touch stranger. There’s violence and bloodshed and
beautiful women naked and as the folds of film slowly reveal
themselves, all of it makes wonderful sense. The Skin I
Live In is a sheer delight to watch and will certainly
find itself on my best of the year list.
The Lesson:
See everything Pedro Almodovar ever makes.
- Noah Sanders
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