The Skin I Live In
Encyclopedia
The Skin I Live In is a 2011 Spanish film directed by Pedro Almodóvar
, starring Antonio Banderas
, Elena Anaya
, Marisa Paredes
, Jan Cornet, Roberto Álamo and Blanca Suárez, and is loosely based on Thierry Jonquet
's novel Tarantula
. The film was the first collaboration in 21 years between Almodóvar and his former regular cast member Banderas. The film premiered in May 2011 in competition at the 64th Cannes Film Festival
.
's novel Mygale
("Tarantula" in English), published first in French and then in English under the same title. Almodóvar described the film as "a horror story without screams or frights".
The film is set in Toledo
. In 2012, surgeon Robert Ledgard (Banderas) has succeeded in cultivating a skin that cannot burn, claiming he has only tested the process on mice. At his estate, which also serves as a facility for medical research and operations, he is holding a young woman named Vera (Anaya) captive with the help of his servant Marilia (Paredes). It is carnival season. While Robert is away, Zeca (Álamo), having committed a robbery, arrives in carnival costume as a tiger to ask Marilia, his mother, to hide him for a few days. He learns of the female captive. When Marilia refuses to hide him or grant him access to the captive, he binds and gags Marilia, gets to the captive, and rapes her. Robert arrives, interrupts the rape, and kills Zeca.
Marilia tells the captive that she is mother to both Zeca and Robert by different men, a fact she has not shared with them. To explain what motivates Robert's experiments on the captive, she explains that Robert's wife was burned in a car crash twelve years earlier. When she saw what she looked like after the accident, "a cinder," she jumped from a window to her death. Their daughter Norma (Suárez) witnessed the suicide and required psychiatric treatment thereafter. Marilia's story segues into a flashback.
It is six years earlier. Vicente (Cornet), a young man who works in his mother's dress shop, makes unsuccessful advances toward his lesbian co-worker. Norma is temporarily released from psychiatric care to attend a wedding with her father. At the reception dance, Vicente leads her into the garden and attempts to have sex with her. When she screams, he hits her and flees. Robert finds his daughter, and, as she awakens, she imagines he is her rapist. She is incarcerated for more psychiatric treatment and soon commits suicide. As revenge for the rape, Robert, in disguise, kidnaps Vicente and performs sex reassignment surgery
on him. He turns Vicente into a physical replication of his deceased wife.
It is 2012 again. Following Zeca's attack and Marilia's explanation, Vicente, now a woman, has taken the name Vera and co-operates with Robert. Fulgencio (Fernández), one of Robert's colleagues, reads a news story about a missing youth named Vicente and recognizes him as the subject of sex re-assignment surgery. He accuses Robert of falsifying documents to conduct that surgery and of experimenting on Vicente. Vera arrives to support Robert by asserting her willing participation. Having gained Robert's trust, Vera kills him and then Marilia. Vera returns to the dress shop and tells her mother and co-worker that she is Vicente, now a woman.
read Thierry Jonquet
's Tarantula about ten years before the film premiered. He described what attracted him in the novel as "the magnitude of Doctor Ledgard's vendetta". This became the core of the adaptation, which over time moved further and further from the original plot of the novel. Almodóvar was inspired by Georges Franju
's Eyes Without a Face
and the thriller films of Fritz Lang
when he wrote the screenplay.
The director announced the film project in 2002, when he envisioned Antonio Banderas
and Penélope Cruz
in the film's two leading roles, but he eventually settled on Banderas and Elena Anaya
. The Skin I Live In was the first film Almodóvar and Banderas made together in 21 years, after having been regular collaborators in the 1980s. The film was produced through El Deseo
for a budget of €10 million.
Principal photography
started 23 August 2010 and ended almost four months later. Filming locations included Santiago de Compostela
, Madrid, and a country house outside Toledo
.
. Due to developments in the industry of film distribution, El Deseo decided to abandon their previous release strategy for Almodóvar'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 will however be released worldwide in the autumn. The British release is set to 26 August 2011 through 20th Century Fox
. In Spain it is set to premiere on 2 September 2011. The film will be released in the United States on 14 October the same year in a limited run through Sony Pictures Classics
following its American premiere at the 49th New York Film Festival
on 12 October 2011.
, said "Along with such usual Almodóvar obsessions as betrayal, anxiety, loneliness, sexual identity and death, the Spanish director has added a science-fiction element that verges on horror. But like many lab experiments, this melodramatic hybrid makes for an unstable fusion. Only someone as talented as Almodóvar could have mixed such elements without blowing up an entire movie." Honeycutt continued: "The film's design, costumes and music, especially Alberto Iglesias' music, present a lushly beautiful setting, which is nonetheless a prison and house of horror. Almodóvar pumps his movie full of deadly earnestness and heady emotions." David Gritten notes Almodóvar "reaches out tentatively into unexplored genre territory—horror...Yet despite squirm-worthy moments ... the promise of horror gives way to Almodóvar’s broader, familiar preoccupations: identity, blood ties, disguises and genetic traits." According to Gritten, "A list of the story’s various elements—date rape
, murder, secrets, lies, mystery parents, gender ambiguity, unbreakable emotional bonds—confirms The Skin I Live In as essentially a melodrama
. Yet Almodóvar’s story-telling is nowhere near as shrill as it once was: as a mature artist, he has refined his skills to a point where these soap-opera tropes
assimilate smoothly into a complex whole....Typically for Almodóvar, it all looks ravishing, thanks to production designer Antxon Gómez and cinematographer José Luis Alcaine
. All three men have the gift of investing mundane objects with a unique sheen; here even surgical instruments, about to be used malevolently, assume a dreamy, otherworldly quality. The Skin I Live In is the work of a master near the top of his game."
Upon its UK premiere, Peter Bradshaw
gave it four stars out of five, calling it "fantastically twisted" and "a truly macabre suspense thriller"—"Banderas is a wonderfully charismatic leading man; Almodóvar has found in him what Hitchcock
found in Cary Grant
. He is stylish, debonair, but with a chilling touch of determination and menace."
Pedro Almodóvar
Pedro Almodóvar Caballero is a Spanish film director, screenwriter and producer.Almodóvar is arguably the most successful and internationally known Spanish filmmaker of his generation. His films, marked by complex narratives, employ the codes of melodrama and use elements of pop culture, popular...
, starring Antonio Banderas
Antonio Banderas
José Antonio Domínguez Banderas , better known as Antonio Banderas, is a Spanish film actor, film director, film producer and singer...
, Elena Anaya
Elena Anaya
Elena Anaya is a Spanish actress whose career dates back to 1995.Anaya is the youngest of 5 children. She first received international attention in 2001 for her role in the sexually explicit drama Lucía y el sexo and also appeared in Pedro Almodóvar's Hable con ella .Her best-known Hollywood film...
, Marisa Paredes
Marisa Paredes
María Luisa Paredes Bartolomé, , better known in show business as Marisa Paredes, is a Spanish actress.-Biography:...
, Jan Cornet, Roberto Álamo and Blanca Suárez, and is loosely based on Thierry Jonquet
Thierry Jonquet
Thierry Jonquet was a French writer who specialised in crime novels with political themes. He was born in Paris; his most recent and best known novel outside of France was Mygale , then published in the US in 2003 by City Lights. Mygale was also published in the UK as Tarantula in 2005...
's novel Tarantula
Mygale (novel)
Mygale is a novel by Thierry Jonquet first published in France by Editions Gallimard in 1995, and then published in the US in 2003 by City Lights. It was also published in the UK as Tarantula in 2005 ....
. The film was the first collaboration in 21 years between Almodóvar and his former regular cast member Banderas. The film premiered in May 2011 in competition at the 64th Cannes Film Festival
2011 Cannes Film Festival
The 64th annual Cannes Film Festival was held from May 11 to May 22, 2011. American actor Robert De Niro served as the president of the jury for the main competition and French filmmaker Michel Gondry headed the jury for the short film competition...
.
Plot
The Skin I Live In is based on Thierry JonquetThierry Jonquet
Thierry Jonquet was a French writer who specialised in crime novels with political themes. He was born in Paris; his most recent and best known novel outside of France was Mygale , then published in the US in 2003 by City Lights. Mygale was also published in the UK as Tarantula in 2005...
's novel Mygale
Mygale (novel)
Mygale is a novel by Thierry Jonquet first published in France by Editions Gallimard in 1995, and then published in the US in 2003 by City Lights. It was also published in the UK as Tarantula in 2005 ....
("Tarantula" in English), published first in French and then in English under the same title. Almodóvar described the film as "a horror story without screams or frights".
The film is set in Toledo
Toledo, Spain
Toledo's Alcázar became renowned in the 19th and 20th centuries as a military academy. At the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in 1936 its garrison was famously besieged by Republican forces.-Economy:...
. In 2012, surgeon Robert Ledgard (Banderas) has succeeded in cultivating a skin that cannot burn, claiming he has only tested the process on mice. At his estate, which also serves as a facility for medical research and operations, he is holding a young woman named Vera (Anaya) captive with the help of his servant Marilia (Paredes). It is carnival season. While Robert is away, Zeca (Álamo), having committed a robbery, arrives in carnival costume as a tiger to ask Marilia, his mother, to hide him for a few days. He learns of the female captive. When Marilia refuses to hide him or grant him access to the captive, he binds and gags Marilia, gets to the captive, and rapes her. Robert arrives, interrupts the rape, and kills Zeca.
Marilia tells the captive that she is mother to both Zeca and Robert by different men, a fact she has not shared with them. To explain what motivates Robert's experiments on the captive, she explains that Robert's wife was burned in a car crash twelve years earlier. When she saw what she looked like after the accident, "a cinder," she jumped from a window to her death. Their daughter Norma (Suárez) witnessed the suicide and required psychiatric treatment thereafter. Marilia's story segues into a flashback.
It is six years earlier. Vicente (Cornet), a young man who works in his mother's dress shop, makes unsuccessful advances toward his lesbian co-worker. Norma is temporarily released from psychiatric care to attend a wedding with her father. At the reception dance, Vicente leads her into the garden and attempts to have sex with her. When she screams, he hits her and flees. Robert finds his daughter, and, as she awakens, she imagines he is her rapist. She is incarcerated for more psychiatric treatment and soon commits suicide. As revenge for the rape, Robert, in disguise, kidnaps Vicente and performs sex reassignment surgery
Sex reassignment surgery
Sex reassignment surgery is a term for the surgical procedures by which a person's physical appearance and function of their existing sexual characteristics are altered to resemble...
on him. He turns Vicente into a physical replication of his deceased wife.
It is 2012 again. Following Zeca's attack and Marilia's explanation, Vicente, now a woman, has taken the name Vera and co-operates with Robert. Fulgencio (Fernández), one of Robert's colleagues, reads a news story about a missing youth named Vicente and recognizes him as the subject of sex re-assignment surgery. He accuses Robert of falsifying documents to conduct that surgery and of experimenting on Vicente. Vera arrives to support Robert by asserting her willing participation. Having gained Robert's trust, Vera kills him and then Marilia. Vera returns to the dress shop and tells her mother and co-worker that she is Vicente, now a woman.
Cast
- Antonio BanderasAntonio BanderasJosé Antonio Domínguez Banderas , better known as Antonio Banderas, is a Spanish film actor, film director, film producer and singer...
as Robert Ledgard, a surgeon - Blanca Suárez as Norma Ledgard, his daughter
- Marisa ParedesMarisa ParedesMaría Luisa Paredes Bartolomé, , better known in show business as Marisa Paredes, is a Spanish actress.-Biography:...
as Marilia, Robert's servant - Roberto Álamo as Zeca, her son
- Jan Cornet as Vicente Guillén Piñeiro
- Elena AnayaElena AnayaElena Anaya is a Spanish actress whose career dates back to 1995.Anaya is the youngest of 5 children. She first received international attention in 2001 for her role in the sexually explicit drama Lucía y el sexo and also appeared in Pedro Almodóvar's Hable con ella .Her best-known Hollywood film...
as Vera Cruz - Eduard FernándezEduard FernándezEduard Fernández Serrano is an awarded Spanish actor. He has won two Goya Awards, one for Fausto 5.0 and one for En la ciudad .-Selected filmography:*The Skin I Live In...
as Fulgencio, a colleague of Robert
Production
Pedro AlmodóvarPedro Almodóvar
Pedro Almodóvar Caballero is a Spanish film director, screenwriter and producer.Almodóvar is arguably the most successful and internationally known Spanish filmmaker of his generation. His films, marked by complex narratives, employ the codes of melodrama and use elements of pop culture, popular...
read Thierry Jonquet
Thierry Jonquet
Thierry Jonquet was a French writer who specialised in crime novels with political themes. He was born in Paris; his most recent and best known novel outside of France was Mygale , then published in the US in 2003 by City Lights. Mygale was also published in the UK as Tarantula in 2005...
's Tarantula about ten years before the film premiered. He described what attracted him in the novel as "the magnitude of Doctor Ledgard's vendetta". This became the core of the adaptation, which over time moved further and further from the original plot of the novel. Almodóvar was inspired by Georges Franju
Georges Franju
-External links:* at Allmovie...
's Eyes Without a Face
Eyes Without a Face
Eyes Without a Face is a 1960 French-language horror film adaptation of Jean Redon's novel, directed by Georges Franju, and starring Pierre Brasseur and Alida Valli. During the film's production, consideration was given to the standards of European censors by setting the right tone, minimizing...
and the thriller films of Fritz Lang
Fritz Lang
Friedrich Christian Anton "Fritz" Lang was an Austrian-American filmmaker, screenwriter, and occasional film producer and actor. One of the best known émigrés from Germany's school of Expressionism, he was dubbed the "Master of Darkness" by the British Film Institute...
when he wrote the screenplay.
The director announced the film project in 2002, when he envisioned Antonio Banderas
Antonio Banderas
José Antonio Domínguez Banderas , better known as Antonio Banderas, is a Spanish film actor, film director, film producer and singer...
and Penélope Cruz
Penélope Cruz
Penélope Cruz Sánchez is a Spanish actress. Signed by an agent at age 15, she made her acting debut at 16 on television and her feature film debut the following year in Jamón, jamón , to critical acclaim...
in the film's two leading roles, but he eventually settled on Banderas and Elena Anaya
Elena Anaya
Elena Anaya is a Spanish actress whose career dates back to 1995.Anaya is the youngest of 5 children. She first received international attention in 2001 for her role in the sexually explicit drama Lucía y el sexo and also appeared in Pedro Almodóvar's Hable con ella .Her best-known Hollywood film...
. The Skin I Live In was the first film Almodóvar and Banderas made together in 21 years, after having been regular collaborators in the 1980s. The film was produced through El Deseo
El Deseo
El Deseo is film production company owned by Spanish film producers the Almodóvar brothers . Films produced by the company include All About My Mother, Talk to Her, My Life Without Me, Bad Education, Volver, Broken Embraces and The Skin I Live In.- External links :* Film production company owned...
for a budget of €10 million.
Principal photography
Principal photography
thumb|300px|Film production on location in [[Newark, New Jersey]].Principal photography is the phase of film production in which the movie is filmed, with actors on set and cameras rolling, as distinct from pre-production and post-production....
started 23 August 2010 and ended almost four months later. Filming locations included Santiago de Compostela
Santiago de Compostela
Santiago de Compostela is the capital of the autonomous community of Galicia, Spain.The city's Cathedral is the destination today, as it has been throughout history, of the important 9th century medieval pilgrimage route, the Way of St. James...
, Madrid, and a country house outside Toledo
Toledo, Spain
Toledo's Alcázar became renowned in the 19th and 20th centuries as a military academy. At the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in 1936 its garrison was famously besieged by Republican forces.-Economy:...
.
Release
The film premiered on 19 May in competition at the 2011 Cannes Film Festival2011 Cannes Film Festival
The 64th annual Cannes Film Festival was held from May 11 to May 22, 2011. American actor Robert De Niro served as the president of the jury for the main competition and French filmmaker Michel Gondry headed the jury for the short film competition...
. Due to developments in the industry of film distribution, El Deseo decided to abandon their previous release strategy for Almodóvar'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 will however be released worldwide in the autumn. The British release is set to 26 August 2011 through 20th Century Fox
20th Century Fox
Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation — also known as 20th Century Fox, or simply 20th or Fox — is one of the six major American film studios...
. In Spain it is set to premiere on 2 September 2011. The film will be released in the United States on 14 October the same year in a limited run through Sony Pictures Classics
Sony Pictures Classics
Sony Pictures Classics is an art-house film division of Sony Pictures Entertainment founded in December 1991 that distributes, produces and acquires specialty films from the United States and around the world. Its co-presidents are Michael Barker and Tom Bernard...
following its American premiere at the 49th New York Film Festival
New York Film Festival
The New York Film Festival has been a major film festival since it began in 1963 in New York. The films are selected by the Film Society of Lincoln Center...
on 12 October 2011.
Reception
Kirk Honeycutt, writing for The Hollywood ReporterThe Hollywood Reporter
Formerly a daily trade magazine, The Hollywood Reporter re-launched in late 2010 as a unique hybrid publication serving the entertainment industry and a consumer audience...
, said "Along with such usual Almodóvar obsessions as betrayal, anxiety, loneliness, sexual identity and death, the Spanish director has added a science-fiction element that verges on horror. But like many lab experiments, this melodramatic hybrid makes for an unstable fusion. Only someone as talented as Almodóvar could have mixed such elements without blowing up an entire movie." Honeycutt continued: "The film's design, costumes and music, especially Alberto Iglesias' music, present a lushly beautiful setting, which is nonetheless a prison and house of horror. Almodóvar pumps his movie full of deadly earnestness and heady emotions." David Gritten notes Almodóvar "reaches out tentatively into unexplored genre territory—horror...Yet despite squirm-worthy moments ... the promise of horror gives way to Almodóvar’s broader, familiar preoccupations: identity, blood ties, disguises and genetic traits." According to Gritten, "A list of the story’s various elements—date rape
Date rape
"Date rape", often referred to as acquaintance rape, is an assault or attempted assault usually committed by a new acquaintance involving sexual intercourse without mutual consent....
, murder, secrets, lies, mystery parents, gender ambiguity, unbreakable emotional bonds—confirms The Skin I Live In as essentially a melodrama
Melodrama
The term melodrama refers to a dramatic work that exaggerates plot and characters in order to appeal to the emotions. It may also refer to the genre which includes such works, or to language, behavior, or events which resemble them...
. Yet Almodóvar’s story-telling is nowhere near as shrill as it once was: as a mature artist, he has refined his skills to a point where these soap-opera tropes
Trope (literature)
A literary trope is the usage of figurative language in literature, or a figure of speech in which words are used in a sense different from their literal meaning...
assimilate smoothly into a complex whole....Typically for Almodóvar, it all looks ravishing, thanks to production designer Antxon Gómez and cinematographer José Luis Alcaine
José Luis Alcaine
José Luis Alcaine is a Spanish born cinematographer. He was educated in Tangier's French Lycee Regnault and in the Spanish Institute. He was the first cinematographer to use fluorescent tube as key lighting in the 1970s. He has worked on films such as Belle Époque Blast from the Past, and Two Much...
. All three men have the gift of investing mundane objects with a unique sheen; here even surgical instruments, about to be used malevolently, assume a dreamy, otherworldly quality. The Skin I Live In is the work of a master near the top of his game."
Upon its UK premiere, Peter Bradshaw
Peter Bradshaw
Peter Bradshaw is a British writer and film critic. He was educated at Cambridge University, where he was President of Footlights.Bradshaw is a film critic for The Guardian...
gave it four stars out of five, calling it "fantastically twisted" and "a truly macabre suspense thriller"—"Banderas is a wonderfully charismatic leading man; Almodóvar has found in him what Hitchcock
Alfred Hitchcock
Sir Alfred Joseph Hitchcock, KBE was a British film director and producer. He pioneered many techniques in the suspense and psychological thriller genres. After a successful career in British cinema in both silent films and early talkies, Hitchcock moved to Hollywood...
found in Cary Grant
Cary Grant
Archibald Alexander Leach , better known by his stage name Cary Grant, was an English actor who later took U.S. citizenship...
. He is stylish, debonair, but with a chilling touch of determination and menace."
External links
- Official website at Sony Pictures ClassicsSony Pictures ClassicsSony Pictures Classics is an art-house film division of Sony Pictures Entertainment founded in December 1991 that distributes, produces and acquires specialty films from the United States and around the world. Its co-presidents are Michael Barker and Tom Bernard...