Butler's Cinema Scene

Antonio Banderas, Elena Anaya

“THE SKIN I LIVE IN”  My rating: B 

117 minutes |  MPAA rating: R

“The Skin I Live In” is one spectacularly sick movie.

I kinda loved it.

This heady mashup of “Frankenstein”/mad scientist horror story, sexual fantasy, revenge yarn and existential escape caper shows Spanish writer/director Pedro Almodovar indulging numerous of his well-chronicled obsessions.

The resulting film is simultaneously creepy and beautiful. Think of it as a less offensive (but equally disturbing) “Human Centipede” for the art house crowd.

Vera (Elena Anaya) is the only patient in a private clinic in the home of brilliant plastic surgeon Robert Ledgard (Almodovar stalwart Antonio Banderas).

Vera lives in a hermetically sealed, sterile-looking room. She wears a form-clinging body stocking outfitted with various flaps and zippers so that Robert can examine his handiwork. Clearly, Vera has undergone some major skin grafts.

What tragedy — accident, disease or birth defect — required such extensive surgery? We don’t know, but the operations have been spectacularly successful, for Vera’s skin is a thing of incredible beauty.

In other aspects her life is troubling. She isn’t allowed out of her room, which is wired with a sophisticated surveillance system. Vera’s only human contact is with Robert and his cook/housekeeper, Marilla (Marisa Paredes).

Her keepers are thoughtful, kind and nurturing…but nevertheless Vera is a prisoner.

What’s going on here?

We get the answers in two extensive flashbacks (Almodovar does love his flashbacks).

In the first we learn about Robert’s early life with a mentally unstable wife and the unhappy fate of his equally troubled teenage daughter (Blanca Suarez), whose sexual exploitation by a young man (Jan Cornet) pushes her into full-blown madness.

The second flashback…well, let’s not go there, except to say that good doctor Robert goes a bit bonkers himself, fashioning a revenge that takes full advantage of his unique  skill set.

Almodovar sprinkles his brooding yarn with references to other movies, particularly Georges Franju’s “Eyes Without a Face” (for parts of the movie Vera must wear a plastic mask that protects her face while it is healing).

The acting here is very good. For once Banderas gets to play a villain, but at least he’s a three-dimensional baddie. The contrast of his suave, seductive exterior with the roiling nutcase inside is especially effective.

Anaya (seen earlier this summer in the French thriller “Point Blank”), who has the film’s most challenging role (wish I could explain why, but it would give too much away), seems poised to stake her claim as one of the screen’s most haunting beauties. It almost hurts to gaze upon her, and Almodovar’s camera moves in close like a panting voyeur.

But this is clearly Almodovar’s baby, one that eschews his sometimes snarky humor for a dead-seriousness that only makes the film’s third-act reveal all the more stomach-churning.

Is “The Skin I Live In” deliciously perverse or just plain nasty?

That, dear moviegoer, you must answer for yourself.

| Robert W. Butler