In Contention

Tag: Live Flesh

  • SHORT TAKE: “The Skin I Live In” (***)

    Cannes Film Festival

    Pedro Almodóvar’s new feature opens with a pause: a beautiful young woman holds a tricky yoga position, her already fine-lathed physique vacuumed into a nude body stocking, stretched across a couch like a pale side of meat hung out for curing. So so taut, so fragile, it seems a simple tap on the shoulder will splinter her perfect form into a chandelier’s worth of glass shards — and that’s an apt note of tension on which to begin “The Skin I Live In,” a coldly kinky thriller in which Almodóvar’s career-long concern with the manipulation and violation of the human body is bent back so far it has nothing left to do but break.

    The girl is actress Elena Anaya; who she’s playing is a question the film keeps in play for far longer than you’d think feasible in a narrative that deftly splits and reshapes identity across a pair of linked tragedies in the life of Antonio Banderas’ demented genius of a plastic surgeon. Adapted — rather liberally, I understand — from Thierry Jonquet’s novel “Tarantula,” the film’s dense structure plays Snakes and Ladders with chronology (a late-film title card that reads “back to the present” drew chuckles in the audience for its apparent self-exasperation), staggering major twists across its running time that makes it a challenge to discuss in any narrative capacity. (It hardly flatters the reviewer’s role to say this, but audiences are better off reading as little about the film as possible before entering the theater: ignorance really is bliss here.)

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  • CANNES CHECK: ‘The Skin I Live In’

    [This is the first in a daily series of posts, wherein I size up the 19 films–pending further additions–in the Competition at next month’s Cannes Film Festival. We’re running through them alphabetically, by director, so it just happens that we start with a biggie: the length of the entries will vary according to the availability of information.]

    The director: Pedro Almodóvar

    The talent: The star, as you surely know by now, is Antonio Banderas, a one-time Almodóvar regular who hasn’t collaborated with the director in 21 years. When Penelope Cruz proved unavailable, Spanish star Elena Anaya (who previously appeared in “Talk to Her”) stepped into the female lead. Meanwhile, the names of cinematographer José Luis Alcaine, composer Alberto Iglesias and actress Marisa Paredes will all be familiar to the Almodóvar faithful.

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  • Película negra

    I’m sure many of you by now have seen the gorgeous European poster artwork for Pedro Almodóvar’s upcoming “Broken Embraces,” in all its lurid Warholian variations. (If you haven’t, Nat Rogers has the lot here.)

    Now, even more enticingly, we have the first full-length Spanish trailer for the film, an expansion of sorts of the enigmatic teaser that was revealed a few weeks ago. Obviously, it comes without English subtitles, and I’m afraid my college-boy Spanish is not what it was a few years ago, so I still have only a vague grasp of what it’s all about. Fine by me … when I’m looking forward to a film as much as this one, I prefer to remain as unspoiled as possible.

    Regardless, the trailer appears to confirm suspicions that this is a return for the master to the cruel, contemporary noir territory of “Live Flesh” and “Bad Education” — which might come as a relief to those, like me, who found “Volver,” for all its candy-coloured beauty, a little fey for its own good. As it stands, the pristine femme fatale styling of Penelope Cruz, and the popping hues of Rodrigo Prieto’s apparently luscious lensing, immediately call to mind John M. Stahl’s dayglo melodrama/noir/kitsch hybrid “Leave Her to Heaven.”

    Which is fine by me. But that’s just going on appearances. The Spanish, of course, get to find out on March 18. The rest of us have rather longer to wait.