AccueilLa piel que habito (English Version)
le 11/08/2011 - par San Penn pour CQN Il n'y a pas de commentaire, soyez le premier à réagir !Directed by : Pedro Almodóvar Spanish drama. Length: 2h00min Starring : Antonio Banderas, Elena Anaya, Marisa Paredes..
Plot : Based on Theirry Jonque‘s 2005 book Tarantula, the film follows a plastic surgeon’s revenge on the man who raped his daughter… The accomplished surgeon Robert Ledgard (Banderas) succeeds to cultivate a skin which can withstand any kind of assault. Such a skin would have been able to save his wife, who was burned in a car crash twelve years earlier. To his help, Ledgard has an accomplice, Marilia (Paredes), and a human guinea pig.
After having spent my first day at Cannes getting used to waiting hours at a time in the often faint hope of actually being let in to watch a film, my efforts finally bore fruit on the morning of my second day at the festival, when I managed to squeeze my way into one of the equally grand secondary cinema halls, in order to catch a repeated screening of Pedro Almodóvar’s latest offering, ‘La Piel Que Habito’, starring his familiar stalwarts Antonio Banderas (although this is their first movie together in twenty-one years) and Marisa Paredes, along with the younger Elena Anaya, an extremely talented and beautiful actress who has been making her name in Spain over the last decade or so (Almodóvar initially wanted Penélope Cruz in the lead role, but eventually settled for Anaya – look her up, she’s worth it).
Some of my friends had already caught the main première the previous evening, where Almodóvar, his younger sibling Agustín (the producer of all of Pedro’s films), Banderas, Paredes and Anaya had walked the glamorous tapis rouge and left us, the hungry audience, even hungrier. Having not previously been through the Almodóvar experience myself (this is, needless to say, something I am not very proud of), I just knew that the re-run the following morning had to be the time and place when I’d finally be free of my Almodóvar virginity.
The synopsis of the movie somewhat misleadingly suggests a simple revenge tale of a plastic surgeon on the hunt for the man who raped his daughter. However, armed with prior knowledge of the nuances generally underlying Almodóvar’s universe (desire, in addition to varying degrees of homosexuality, love and obsession), the presence of the word ‘Piel’ (Spanish for ‘skin’) in the film title, and the accompanying image (right) which was a constant presence whenever the film was advertised, one is compelled to conclude that the official billing of an hour and fifty-seven minutes would necessarily offer much, much more than a mere personal hunt for a rapist.
Robert Ledgard (Antonio Banderas) is a plastic surgeon who owns and runs a private clinic from his mansion just outside of Toledo, Spain, and one who’s apparently made his money, to say the least. He is a widower whose wife died of severe burns from a car crash, and has since then devoted his research to finding ways of strengthening the human skin through mutation (all thoughts of X-Men to be imperatively shunned at this point). His methods of pursuing his desire to create the ultimate and most ‘beautiful’ human skin are not necessarily seen as ethical, and we immediately begin to understand that his obsession stems from his helplessness and inability, as one of the leading face-transplant surgeons in the world, to save his dying wife from her severely burnt condition after her accident.
We are also introduced to Marilia (Marisa Paredes), the house-keeper, and then subsequently to per-haps the character of the greatest in-trigue in the film, a mysterious girl named Vera (Elena Anaya), who seems resigned to being held captive by Ledgard in a room adjacent to his own in the mansion, and who appears to be the subject of Ledgard’s skin experiments. While it is indeed shocking that the narrative shows Ledgard nonchalantly and unscrupulously making use of a human guinea pig for his experiments, we are still left to wonder who the two characters really are and what their relationship is. The full brute force of the revelation of this entire chain of events is not thrust upon us until much later, when everything is presented and laid bare so unemotionally, that the film seems to have followed a logical sequence of events, and there seems to be little wrong with what either character does throughout.
We continuously learn a lot about Dr. Robert Ledgard – his obsession, his single-mindedness, his stubbornness bordering on arrogance, his determination, and finally, his weakness. The behaviours of the characters seem somewhat strange and inexplicable at certain times, but on hindsight seem justified. A few sequences (primarily between Vera and Robert) contain horrifically dark and twisted humour, and while a few people in the audience had it in them to actually giggle and even let out soft laughs, I found the dialogue exchanges rather shocking, and thought they clearly portrayed Robert’s conviction in what he was doing, and reinforced his be-liefs in his obsessions and in his own sense of justice.
While Dr. Ledgard comes off as an extremely resolute and obstinate individual, the same can hardly be said about Vera. She seems resigned to her ongoing predicament (and sometimes I wondered whether it was a predicament at all), in some way suggesting that she accepted it. She also seems to be awaiting some kind of gesture from Robert – a sort of acceptance, of acknowledgement, of recognition – which does not immediately seem forthcoming. We cannot help but think that there exists a spark between them from the way they speak to and look at each other, and more importantly, we cannot help but think what is preventing them from mutually extinguishing their fires.
The film will certainly have you hooked right from start to finish, as things that are vital to the plot seem to keep happening constantly and at a brisk pace. There are occasions when we’re (rightly, I believe) not afforded time to dwell on what we’ve just witnessed, which is the principal reason why the whole film appears impassive and emotionless. Banderas looks very much believable and in con-trol as a plastic surgeon, and Anaya is so beautiful that you’d hardly notice her acting talents.
When the final credits started rolling, I found that I was not in a position to pass judgment on either of the two principal characters, that I was tricked into forfeiting my right to decide what was right and what wasn’t. Once again, Almodóvar has successfully weaved a number of inter-related stories around a theme extremely familiar to him, and has somehow managed to reasonably justify all of them.
One would be tempted to ask, ‘What is revenge, then? And how far would you go for it?’
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