Silver Screen Streak List #26: 02. The Skin I Live In (2011)

The Skin I Live In (2011) is the second Pedro Almodóvar that has come up during this movie challenge, following Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown (1988), which ended my streak through List #13, Best Foreign Language Oscar Nominees. My ambivalence to Almodóvar has been a recurring theme during my movie challenge projects over the last decade, and you can see some of my concerns with the Spanish director echoed in this 2016 review of All About My Mother (1999) and even my relatively positive 2017 thoughts on Talk to Her (2002). At the risk of sounding like a broken record, I had hoped that The Skin I Live In, with its horror-adjacent ideas, might break my trend of indifference to the popular Spanish director, but it didn't.

Antonio Banderas stars as Robert Ledgard, a plastic surgeon who sticks close to typical movie mad scientist tropes: he's a wealthy eccentric, he's ordered by hospital scolds to end his unethical experiments, he pursues his controversial ideas at home in an impossibly swanky secret lab on a subject (Elena Anaya) who appears to be a prisoner. At first, it seems like Ledgard's experiment has something to do with the development of a superior, more resilient artificial skin, but there's something far more nefarious going on — tied to a legacy of family tragedies.

It's no secret by this point that I am not on the same wavelength as Almodóvar. I fundamentally don't find what he's going for, or how he goes about it, very interesting. Or, less charitably, I simply see a shallow surface where others are able to extrapolate something deeply entertaining and/or provocative. Like in Almodóvar's other films, I can see him broaching in The Skin I Live In repetitive subject matter with an often appealing visual design but little actual insight. I don't think his character motivations are consistently legible and now suspect that he uses camp melodrama signifiers as a way to avoid digging meaningfully into his dark and chaotic queer ideas about identity and familial love. His movies read to me like someone playing with dolls to avoid the hard work of dealing with their issues — an accusation that could easily be leveled at Banderas' character in The Skin I Live In, which might be a sort of confessional of the very emotional impotence that makes Almodóvar's movies so cold and, despite the colorful and perverse trappings, shockingly dull.