The Skin I Live In ***½

Director: Pedro Almodóvar
Cast: Antonio Banderas, Elena Anaya, Jan Cornet, Marisa Paredes
Roberto Álamo, Eduard Fernández, José Luis Gómez, Blanca Suárez

The Skin I Live In is a movie that demands to be seen more than once. The first time, you'll be seduced by Pedro Almodóvar's own kind of trashiness, the one reminiscent of films like Matador and Kika, that has the iconoclastic director revel in shocking his audience with usually outrageous twists and turns.
The second time, after you've received a figurative punch in the gut from the secrets in the plot, you'll be enthralled by Pedro's abilities as a maverick storyteller, by his capacity to rape our minds and make us enjoy it.
Inspired by macabre horror tales like Frankenstein, Eyes Without a Face and exploitation films, The Skin I Live In tells the strange tale of Dr. Robert Ledgard (Banderas), a handsome plastic surgeon, who became obsessed with creating a thicker human skin after his wife and daughter die.
Pedro, as usual, has no care whatsoever for symbolic subtleties and from the start we understand that Robert's intention to make "skin thicker" is a self-preservation matter: he's trying to stop others from breaking his heart again.
However this doesn't mean he's a saint, in fact he's far from it, as he runs all his experiments on Vera (Anaya), a mysterious woman he's keeping captive in his house.
Vera spends her days inside a locked room, where she practices yoga and reads while wearing a body-length suit to keep her recently implanted skin from damage. Anaya grabs on to this role ferociously and develops the moves of a trapped panther, slightly reminding us of Cat People's Simone Simon (in what might be another of Pedro's winks).
The camera seems to be in love with her sensuous movements - even more so than with her naked body which is usually shown in scenes of extreme brutality or as an art object to inspire our darkest voyeurism - and we soon learn that Vera hides some secrets too: her past connects her directly with Robert's greatest misfortune.
As is norm in all of his works, Pedro weaves a tale that combines melodrama and tragedy with dark humor and deep sexual insight, as well as flashbacks and meticulous recreations of previous events. Marisa Paredes is brilliant as Robert's maid who, you guessed it, harbors some secrets of her own as well, and Jan Cornet brings just the right amount of sleaze to a character that eventually becomes the movie's moral centerpiece.
Once again we meet characters that go beyond the notions of heroes and villains and while Pedro has never been particularly known for his realism, he never fully goes for archetypes either. He's a master at creating characters whose humanity thrives despite their caricaturesque features.
Therefore we see a Robert who on the surface could very well be Dr. Delambre, from Kurt Neumann's The Fly, but in the end reaches the tragic crescendo of a film noir antihero who has been inspired by a Shakespearean drama. Banderas - who has never been a particularly gifted actor - brings to the table what might be his best quality: his ridiculous good looks.
By making Robert someone with weathered beauty, we understand that we shouldn't judge him for his current actions, for he once was like the rest of us. That is perhaps the central theme in the film: the situations that lead ordinary people to become monstrous.

Broken Embraces ****

Director: Pedro Almodóvar
Cast: Penélope Cruz, Lluís Homar, Blanca Portillo
José Luis Gómez, Rubén Ochandiano, Tamar Novas, Ángela Molina
Lola Dueñas, Chus Lampreave, Rossy de Palma, Kiti Manver

Life may not offer any extra footage but the redeeming, regenerative power of movies has the effect of rebirth in Pedro Almodóvar's "Broken Embraces".

A cunning examination of the auteur's role as both God and devil, the plot centers on Harry Caine (Homar) a blind screenwriter who reminisces about his past.
He remembers how fourteen years before, he wasn't only able to see, but was a thriving film director called Mateo Blanco. During the filming of his first comedy he fell in love with his leading lady Lena (Cruz), mistress of Ernesto Martel (Gómez) a powerful businessman turned movie producer.
When their affair ends, Mateo takes the name of Harry and is left putting back together the pieces of what went wrong. This doesn't only include their doomed relationship, but the reconstruction of the movie he let slip away from his fingers.
With his usual mix of melodrama, dark comedy and referential winks, Almodóvar comes up with one of his mot labyrinthine creations yet, in which revenge tales get tangled among studio productions, Oedipal vendettas and Hitchcockian voyeurism.
Because "Broken Embraces" above everything is a movie about watching. Mateo watches through his camera, Harry watches with his other senses, Almodóvar watches through his own lens and then there's also us as an audience.
When a character named Ray-X (Ochandiano) appears asking Harry to write a screenplay with him, he also brings a camera.
What interests Pedro here is pulling off the hat trick Michelangelo Antonioni did in "Blow Up" by coming to terms with the tragic fact that no single person in the world will be able to see it all.
This is brought up in a scene of haunting beauty where Mateo takes a picture at the beach, only to discover a couple in an embrace when he develops the film. The couple wasn't there before, but it was.
This acknowledgment of our limitation as humans offers Almodóvar another chance to try and be God by establishing that a film-considering you keep the raw material-can be done and undone in a million different ways, each time creating something completely new and magical.
While a life has no director's cut.
In her fourth collaboration with Almodóvar, Cruz gives perhaps her most complex performance to date. Lena starts as a secretary with a "Belle de Jour" past who gives in to Martel because he helps her out economically.
We can't however bring ourselves to question her morally and in several scenes Lena goes through self flagellation that reaches heartbreaking proportions.
She's "too beautiful to be funny" says Mateo's assistant Judit (Portillo) about Lena, but she proves her wrong by turning in a delightful performance in "Girls and Suitcases" (the movie within a movie that also turns out to be "Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown").
The director gives Cruz an Audrey Hepburn look (there's a ponytail straight out of "Funny Face") but her performance is shaped around Ingrid Bergman.
From her prostitution-out-of-duty in movies like "Notorious" and to a degree "Casablanca", to her heartbreaking turn in "Voyage to Italy" (a scene of which is featured in the moment where the film's title is borrowed from) to even aspects of Bergman's personal life (falling in love with her renowned director while being in a relationship).
Like a Bergman performance, Cruz inhabits Lena quietly. Her introduction happens in the most inconsequential of ways to show us how Cruz's beauty is the rare kind that can also go unseen. Her way of giving herself to Mateo fills the screen with the kind of passion classic stars could suggest with a glance.
Homar's double turn reminds us of the wonderful characters in film noir. His job is also to evoke Pedro himself and in one scene as he listens to a woman describe herself, his face lights up with the kind of joy we imagine Almodóvar directs every scene with. Gómez gives a menacing performance and Portillo's portrait of bitterness and oxymoronic loving resentment might just be the most layered character in the movie.
There's also a lot of duality in "Broken Embraces" as every character must play a part; they're all involved in a game of hide and seek with each other and themselves. this could bring us to the conclusion that Almodóvar might not be in tune with his characters' needs.
Almost everything in the film reaches redundant proportions as Pedro shows us everything., he tells us everyone's secrets, specifically shoots elements that might otherwise seem irrelevant and even recurs to the sin of matching images with narration. Or so he makes us think.
It's only after the movie has ended that we begin to understand that his plan was to take us into Harry Caine territory all along. Like Harry we remain blind throughout the movie and need to be shown and told everything, up to the most infinite detail.
And like Harry there's more than meets the figurative eye as we leave the movie thinking we know everything. When "Broken Embraces" finishes-on a perfect note-we see a contented Harry confident that he has reached catharsis.
It won't be a mystery if your mind instantly goes back to a scene in the movie where we see a character trying to put together a torn picture on a table. As the camera zooms out we see that it's merely one out of what might be hundreds of photos. When we leave "Broken Embraces" we have just begun to solve the mystery.