La Piel Que Habito
Country of Origin: Spain
Primary Audio Language: Spanish
Director: Pedro Almodóvar
Film Length: 2h 5m
Synopsis: A brilliant plastic surgeon, haunted by past tragedies, creates a type of synthetic skin that withstands any kind of damage. His guinea pig: a mysterious and volatile woman who holds the key to his obsession.
Star Rating: ★★★★★
Review: Guaranteed to be one of the weirdest movies you will ever watch, in any language. Recommended only for those wanting to boggle their minds with pure absurdity. Necessary content warning for rape.
Coming at the heels of my poor review for Automata, I realize this might seem like I just have a passionate distaste for Antonio Banderas, but I promise that isn’t the case. This is now the third movie I knew I was going to be doing a re-watch of when I started this project, but in this case I was hoping my perspective was going to have changed over the last decade. That, unfortunately, proved not to be the case. This movie has haunted me since the first time I watched it, and now that it’s fresh in my memories again, I’m sure it will continue to do so.
[Spoilers] This movie follows Banderas’ character, renowned plastic surgeon, Dr. Robert Ledgard, and the events leading up to and following his daughter’s rape and consequential suicide. Dr. Ledgard decides the best course of revenge is to kidnap the rapist, Vincent (played by Jan Cornet), force him to undergo reconstructive surgery in order to turn him into a woman, and a woman who shares an unsettling resemblance to the now-dead daughter at that, with plans on raping him. Ultimately Vincent, now with a woman’s body, is able to escape and then returns to his friend’s café, with whom he had been flirting with at the very start of the movie, but who rebuffed his advances due to being a lesbian, and the film ends there.
In the same ways I praised foreign films in my review of The Purple Sea for pushing some of the barriers American-made films put up around sensitive topics, I consider this movie to be an example of the other ways those barriers can be pushed, into regions that I personally find to be distasteful. My reluctance to make this comparison is that certain people may consider this movie and the others I've reviewed to fall under the same "sexual perversion" genre, and that both types of films should continue to be avoided by popular American-media. In the end it brings up questions of the limits of art, and if there should be any, and who decides what is appropriate?
Maybe my dislike of this movie is all due to a barrier my own cultural perspective has put up, but I'm sure there are more than enough people who enjoy viewing movies that go to the extremes of what human's are capable of, and if that's the case for you, this film may be right up your alley.
Available On: Amazon Prime, for Purchase
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