In the Flesh: The Skin I Live In (Patreon)

The Skin I Live In is a horny, nasty two-hour soap opera of hidden parentage and surgical forced feminization larded with Spanish director Pedro Almodóvar’s signature twists, reversals, and protracted hostage situations. Where Georges Franju’s Eyes Without a Face — the film’s most obvious inspiration — plays its emotional material close to the vest, The Skin I Live In is broad and melodramatic. Given the film’s preoccupation with gender performance and the acting out of social roles, it’s a tonal change which helps Almodóvar’s interpretation of the same basic story stand as something definitively independent. The female body — the idea of the woman as cultural object — is still central here, but the roles of womanhood and masculinity as public and intimate performances are elevated alongside it.

Dr. Robert Ledgard, played with uncharacteristic icy remove by Antonio Banderas, is the driving force behind the film’s story, but as a person he lives entirely through others. Again and again we see the ways in which he sublimates his emotions into the curation and maintenance of women’s bodies, unable to tolerate his own company in the absence of a feminine subject to control. First he obsesses over his badly burned wife, then his traumatized daughter, and finally — after both women commit suicide — their sexual and emotional proxy, the coercively feminized Vera. In Vera’s case he observes her even when in the next room, silently watching her via closed circuit. Her abduction begins as revenge for the rape of Ledgard’s daughter, but by its end it has revealed itself as a twisted attempt at surrogacy, a way for an emotionally mutilated man to force new tissue into the woman-shaped socket in his own empty chest cavity.

The above image, a shot near the end of the film, is indicative of the best compositions in The Skin I Live In, grotesque undercurrents carefully concealed beneath images crafted to resemble lifestyle magazine spreads. Crisp lines. Visible pores. Images of frozen, consumerist desire as hollow as Ledgard’s meaningless wealth. His own biological mother preserves the secret of his parentage on behalf of his deceased ostensible parents in order to go on serving as his cook and housekeeper, eager to please and care for a man to whom she’s only ever been a servant. This is a film about the near-mystical effect of a man telling you “this is what you are, because it’s what I want you to be”, and if something perverse and desperate might on occasion be glimpsed squirming under that fragile dermis, well, it’s still easier to play along.