The Skin I Live In - DVD Review

'plays out like a Shakespearean farce which has been shown the dark side of his tragedies and decided that it quite likes them too'

Boasting an expertly managed narrative structure and a plot arc that bends from 'a bit odd' to 'what the hell is happening here?', it is difficult not to talk about Pedro Almodóvar's The Skin I Live In in reverent terms. Those looking for 'something different', be warned: this is it, but the after-effects of discovering a film which breaks down moral, narrative, sexual and structural taboos may leave you yearning for Disney's latest.

Almodóvar's film plays out like a Shakespearean farce which has been shown the dark side of his tragedies and decided that it quite likes them too. The scene in the garden, at the wedding of one of protagonist Robert's (Antonio Banderas) friends, is reminiscent of many of the bard's more lewd depictions of bizarrely miss-judged human relationships. The 'swaps' that take place too during the film are overtly Shakespearean in nature but Almodóvar shuns the fantastical elements, focusing instead on the moral implications and 'real-world' - as his film sees it - consequences.

In any other film you might describe Robert as the anti-hero; he often does the wrong things for the right reasons and he is certainly the protagonist, but his decision-making is so twisted, so utterly out of line with rational human thought, that it is difficult to label him as such. Robert is, like the rest of the film's characters, severely psychologically damaged, reacting to loss like a child who won't take no for an answer, albeit a child with a serious and demonstrable God complex. He is, like almost all of the characters, actually the villain of the piece.

The distinctive middle third, which starts to really mess with, firstly, what sort of film you understand The Skin I Live In to be and, secondly, the structure, is an effective change of pace. In another film it might be found to be distracting or to provide more backstory than is needed. In actual fact it is vital. Almodóvar uses the middle to mould our understanding of what has happened and what has yet to come, to play with our expectations of how the film is going to develop - there is even a playful suggestion at a number of points that we might be about to watch some sort of superhero movie.

Whilst that never develops, what does is the director's usual preoccupation with sexual understanding and the manipulation of sexuality, this time wrapped in a warped classical drama that, set mainly in one location, could easily have fallen from somewhere near Shakespeare's pen directly on to a stage. A brave and ambiguous offering, which spends a welcome amount of time threatening the audience with new levels of disturbing oddity.

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'a fascinating, frightening and intelligently conceived thriller' - Top10Films, 4/5