The Skin Live In

[Quincey Homer]

TheSkin I Live In (Spanish: La piel que habito) is a 2011 Spanish thriller and melodrama hybrid film written and directed by Pedro Almodvar, starring Antonio Banderas, Elena Anaya, Marisa Paredes, Jan Cornet and Roberto lamo. It is based on Thierry Jonquet's 1984 novel Mygale, first published in French and then in English under the title Tarantula.[2][4]

Almodvar has described the film as "a horror story without screams or frights".[5] The film was the first collaboration in 21 years between Almodvar and Banderas since Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! (1990).[6] It premiered in May 2011 in competition at the 64th Cannes Film Festival, and won Best Film Not in the English Language at the 65th BAFTA Awards. It was also nominated for the Golden Globe Award for Best Foreign Language Film and 16 Goya Awards.

Plastic surgeon Robert Ledgard was successful in cultivating an artificial skin resistant to burns and insect bites, which he calls "GAL", that he says he has been testing on athymic mice. He presents his results in a medical symposium but when he privately discloses he has also conducted illegal transgenic experiments on humans, he is forbidden to continue with his research.

On his secluded estate, Ledgard is keeping a young woman named Vera captive, with the help of one of his servants, Marilia. Due to the suspension of his official experiments, Ledgard asks Marilia to dismiss the other servants.

While Ledgard is out, Marilia's estranged son Zeca, having committed a robbery, arrives in a tiger costume and asks his mother to hide him for a few days. He sees Vera on Ledgard's security camera screens and demands to see her in person. When Marilia refuses to let him stay after she invites him in, he binds and gags her and then rapes Vera. Ledgard arrives and kills Zeca.

While Ledgard disposes of Zeca's body, Marilia tells Vera that she (Marilia) is the mother of both Zeca and Ledgard by different men, a fact she has not shared with them. Ledgard was adopted by Marilia's employers, but was ultimately raised by her. Zeca later left to live in the streets and smuggle drugs, while Ledgard went to medical school and married a woman named Gal. When Zeca returned years later, he and Gal ran off together. They were involved in a terrible car crash in which Gal was badly burnt. Zeca had left the scene assuming her to be dead, while Ledgard had taken her from the car (in the present, Zeca had mistaken Vera for Gal, something she did not deny). Thereafter she lived in total darkness without any mirrors. One day, while hearing her daughter Norma singing in the garden, Gal accidentally sees her own reflection in the window for the first time since the accident; traumatized by the sight, she jumps to her death in front of Norma.

Ledgard tracks down Vicente and while in disguise, knocks Vicente off his motorbike, kidnaps him, and holds him in captivity. Vicente's mother reports his disappearance to the police, but after they find his motorbike at the bottom of a cliff, they tell her he is likely dead and has been swept out to sea. Although she believes her son is still alive, her search for him remains unsolved. Meanwhile, Ledgard subjects him to a vaginoplasty and later instructs him how to slowly stretch his new vagina. Over a period of six years, Ledgard physically transforms Vicente into a replica of his late wife, and renames him Vera. During this period of time, Vicente struggles to keep himself sane and cling to the core of his true identity, seemingly drugged on opium by Ledgard.

In the present, Ledgard's new relationship with Vera dismays Marilia, who does not trust Vera. Fulgencio, one of Ledgard's colleagues, reads a news story about the missing Vicente and recognizes him as one of their sex change patients. He accuses Ledgard of falsifying Vicente's consent and of experimenting on him. Vera, who overhears their conversation, tells Fulgencio that she is here by her own free will, denies being Vicente, and says that she always was a woman. After Fulgencio leaves, Vera notices a photograph of himself as Vicente attached to the news story about missing persons. During the night, Ledgard and Vera start having sex, but Vera tells him that it is still painful after Zeca's rape. Ostensibly going downstairs to find lubricant, Vera retrieves Ledgard's gun and kills him. Marilia, alerted by the sound of the shot, barges into the bedroom with her own pistol in hand and finds her son Ledgard dead on the bed. Vera, who is hiding under the bed, shoots and kills Marilia. With her final breath, Marilia says "I knew it."

Freed from captivity and the need to play along with Ledgard's whims, Vicente returns to his mother's dress shop for the first time since being kidnapped. Tearfully, he tells his lesbian ex-colleague Cristina (whom Vicente had loved six years prior) of his kidnapping, forced sex change, and the murders. As his mother enters the room, Vicente quietly reveals his identity to them: "I am Vicente."

Pedro Almodvar read Thierry Jonquet's Tarantula approximately ten years before the film premiered. He described what attracted him in the novel as "the magnitude of Doctor Ledgard's vendetta".[7] This became the core of the adaptation, which over time moved further and further from the original plot of the novel. Almodvar was inspired by Georges Franju's Eyes Without a Face and the thriller films of Fritz Lang when he wrote the screenplay.[7]

The film premiered on 19 May 2011 in competition at the 2011 Cannes Film Festival.[10] Due to developments in the industry of film distribution, El Deseo decided to abandon their previous release strategy for Almodvar's works. The director's films had in the past usually been released in Spanish theatres in the spring and internationally during the last quarter of the year. The Skin I Live In was released worldwide in the autumn. The British release was 26 August 2011 through 20th Century Fox.[11] In Spain it premiered on 2 September 2011.[9] The film was released in the United States on 14 October the same year in a limited run through Sony Pictures Classics[12] following its American premiere at the 49th New York Film Festival on 12 October 2011.[13]

On the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, the film holds an 81% approval rating based on reviews from 179 critics, with an average rating of 7.5 out of 10. The site's summary reads "The Skin I Live In lacks Almodvar's famously charged romance, replaced with a wonderfully bizarre and unpredictable detour into arthouse ick".[14] Metacritic assigned the film a weighted average score of 70 out of 100, based on 37 critics, indicating "generally favorable reviews".[15]

In an October 2011 New York Times Critics' Pick review, Manohla Dargis called the film "an existential mystery, a melodramatic thriller, a medical horror film or just a polymorphous extravaganza"; according to Dargis:[19]

It takes time to get a handle on the story (and even then, your grip may not be secure), though it's instantly clear that something is jumping beneath the surface here, threatening to burst forth. Vera's plight and the temporal shifts help create an air of unease and barely controlled chaos, an unsettling vibe that becomes spooky when Ledgard puts on a white lab coat and begins doing strange things with blood....There are times in The Skin I Live In when it feels as if the whole thing will fly into pieces, as complication is piled onto complication, and new characters and intrigues are introduced amid horror, melodrama and slapstick.... [Yet] Mr. Almodvar's control remains virtuosic and the film hangs together completely, secured by Vera and Ledgard and a relationship that's a Pandora's box from which identity, gender, sex and desire spring.

Dana Stevens noted it was Almodvar's "first attempt to blend elements of the horror genre with the high-camp, gender-bending melodrama that's become his stock in trade"; she called it "visually lush and thematically ambitious", a film that "unfolds with a clinical chill we're unaccustomed to feeling in this director's films. The Skin I Live In is a math problem, not a poem. Still, what an elegant proof it is." Stevens called it a "meditation on profound themes: memory, grief, violence, degradation, and survival", a "multigenerational melodrama [that] slowly fuse[s] into a coherent (if wackily improbable) whole", offering "aesthetic and intellectual gratification, but little in the way of emotional punch."[20] The New Yorker ranked the film at No. 25 on their list of "The 26 best films of 2011".[21]

Anaya received the Goya Award for Best Actress. The film won Best Film Not in the English Language at the 65th British Academy Film Awards; in previous years Almodvar won that same award for his 1999 film All About My Mother and his 2002 film Talk to Her.

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