October 25, 2011
Pedro Almodóvar's Skin Game
Posted by Richard Brody
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/movies/2011/10/pedro-almodvars-skin-game.html (http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/movies/2011/10/pedro-almodvars-skin-game.html)
I concur with David that the movie's opening sequence—of its protagonist, Dr. Robert Ledgard (Antonio Banderas), at work in his laboratory on a substitute for skin (his wife was burned to an unrecognizable slurry)—features sleek, stylized images of a sort that's new to Almodóvar. This is all to the good; the director seems both to be stretching his talent into new realms and to be delighting in the paradoxes of sober and sophisticated scientific study converging to a stepwise madness. Yet it's noteworthy that Almodóvar keeps the lid on the craziness; the hectic Grand Guignol plot (which, as David says, involves "a forced sex-change operation") maintains (with several precise exceptions) a contemplative reserve and sobriety. That's because, by way of hyperbolic drama, he's looking at matters of gender and, for that matter, of surgical transformation, with a sincere seriousness and a large dramatic question-mark of soulful mystery.