Posted by ¡Hola mis amigos!
Yo soy Pedro Almodóvar. You all know my movies – Matador, Volver, ¡Átame! - movies about women & men lost in the dangerous maze of contacto sexual. Men who lose their minds in the heart of a woman. And now – ¡ahora! - I have made another: La piel que habito, The Skin I Live In, con mi veijo amigo Antonio Banderas. Aah Tony, mi amor, it’s been far too long.
I am very proud of this movie - claro, claro – but everywhere I go people say “Pedro, this film is creepy, this film is sick, why in the name of your beloved mother – god rest her soul – did you make this perverted picture?” to which I say “Madre Mia! Have you never thrown aside years of your life to stroke the thigh of a forbidden love? Have you never felt the space between life & death between the legs of a siren who ensnared your soul the very second your loins first twisted?! I ask you! Have you not lived!?”
Those dogs did not understand - ¡idiotas! - but I’m sure you, the readers of the Roomyverse, will have no difficulty exploring La piel que habito’s lustrous labyrinth of obsession & death. I will explain the plot to you now, in every detail, and you may judge for yourself whether I, Pedro Almodóvar, am a tawdry puppetmaster of perversity or El Mejor Cineasta de España and the keeper of man’s true spirit. You decide. But be warned, from here on in it’s spoiler central. ¡Comencemos!
Antonio plays Robert, a surgeon splicing human skin with pig skin to make it fireproof after his kidnapped wife is trapped in a blazing car, reducing her beauty to a walking cinder. Robert miraculously nurses her back to life, but when she catches her charred horror in a window’s reflection she leaps to her death, landing at the feet of their only daughter, who is consequently deranged.
Years later Robert removes his little girl from an institution to attend a grand ball, but she’s shepherded into the dark garden by a poor boy whose seduction drives her to insanity when the band suddenly play the very tune that accompanied her mother’s suicide. Discovering his daughter lost to hysteria, Robert kidnaps the boy and surgically makes him a woman with the face of his dead wife.
Trapped in Robert’s house the boy/wife wears a head-to-toe bodystocking to mould him/her into a lady shape. He/she does yoga, reads books, and seems content, until Robert’s maid – who is, unbeknown to Robert, his mother – allows through the gates her lowlife son – who is, unbeknown to Robert, his half brother – who then rapes the boy/wife believing he/she to be the woman he kidnapped and left to burn a lifetime ago. Robert discovers them, guns down his own brother and beds the boy who drove his daughter insane wearing his wife’s skin.
It does not end well, but I ask you, mis amigos, does that sound like a sick movie to you…..? Que?? It does!?! ¡Ay caramba, you people know nada!
Estás muerto para mí.