The Skin I Live In

On the surface, 'The Skin I Live In' is a film that should have my name written all over it.  I'm sure my housemates have said things like that in the past.  The reason is that this is a beard-stroking art house film, in Spanish, with a slightly near-future science fiction sounding premise.  I try to do my best to shake of my reputation of being the kind of person who is naturally drawn to such films, but then I do keep being drawn to them so it's quite hard.

'The Skin I Live In' came out last year and is a film by Almodovar (he has a first name, but like a Brazilian footballer he doesn't have to use it) - the legendary Spanish director who brought you Volver, Todo Sobre Mi Madre and Bad Education.  If you've never heard of any of these films then don't worry, most people haven't.  I tend to watch this stuff cos it's Spanish, but they generally star some well-known people they're well within the  mainstream of the Spanish-speaking diaspora.  'The Skin I Live In' stars Antonio Banderas as a twisted surgeon, who keeps a woman willingly locked in his house as a human guinea pig for a new kind of futuristic skin grafting experiment.  Who this woman is, what her relationship with the doctor is and why she allows herself to be held captive are all mysteries - mysteries that will be solved the the film eventually jumps back in time to fill in crucial gaps.  We then come to a huge and non-sensical twist.

The film is deeply pretentious and rather than inflaming some kind of inner realisation about the nature of gender roles (as I assume was the point) it just made me sigh and think 'is this it?'.  Does Almodovar really think he's making some kind of clever statement about sexuality with this film?  Most of his films do something to challenge gender roles or sexuality, but - and I'm trying not to give the twist away here - does he really imagine that homophobes across the land are going to be re-evaluating their opinions as a result?  I found the film to be trying far too hard to obliquely make a point that I struggled to fathom, but one that I'm sure isn't as radical as the director thought it was going to be.

Cinematography and art aside (the film has a fantastically clean look that hints at an upper-middle class setting in a world that is slowly going wrong) I didn't really think too highly of 'The Skin I Live In'.  Plus then there's the weird bit the the woman's son who turns up and is suddenly a rapist.  What was the point of that?  I'm not telling you not to watch this, just beware that it was too pretentious even for me.