Robert F. Funke

So once I realized that I had made a huge mistake and this wasn’t PUSS IN BOOTS, I nearly left. But then I stuck it out and saw THE SKIN I LIVE IN, which was similar, but with a less sexually confusing main character. Spoilers ahead.

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I took the liberty of giving the pretty amazing movie poster an appropriate tagline.

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Before I cut off my seriousness and give myself a joke-o-plasty, let me say this about the film: It’s not very good. I know, I know. Almodovar is a genius. And he is. The film is beautiful, and it twists your gut in strange ways and seriously will make you grossed out by the very boobs you once thought would make this movie awesome. It stands as a thought-provoking piece of art/camp meditation on the nature of identity, sanity, revenge, and love. I know. Pygmalion story. I know. But here’s the thing: the script is bad. Almodovar is very good. Very very good. I had never seen an Almodovar movie; I would now like to see a couple more Almodovar movies. His talent bursts forth from the screen with great salience. But the script is bad.

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“Oh Funke, you’re just being a douche because you’re a screenwriting student who may never make a dime in this business and as a result you want to cut down the work of celebrated international filmmaker Pedro Almodovar.” –inner voice of self-loathing that comments on everything I ever tweet or tumbl.

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If you’ll excuse me, inner voice of self-loathing, that’s not what I’m doing here, at least I don’t think. I am a douche, but this is not me being a douche. I will defend some pretty bad movies if they are earnestly rendered (SEE: “Seven Pounds”). But this movie’s script was structured in such a way to preserve the twistiness of each twist—and twists they are, good ones—and not to effectively tell a story about characters about whom we care. And as a result, we get an uneven movie that makes us feel extreme emotions to watered-down degrees. That’s my opinion, and I’m sticking to it.

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What you get, then, is a ten-minute scene a third of the way into the movie where a character’s sane-unless-she’s-doing-something-totally-insane mother just TALKS her way through the entire genesis of our mad scientist protagonist. He was married, his wife left him and got burned alive in a car crash, he tried to fix her and she k’d herself, and then we got where we are, which is in a really nice house (seriously guys, this house!) with Antonio Banderas and the most beautiful doe-eyed Spanish actress I’ll tragically never be able to sexually fantasize about again. And a guy dressed as a tiger who r’s the beautiful doe-eyed girl in a Shakespearian case of “oops we were in love and then I watched you die but here you are alive I love you now I’m going to force myself upon you while my mother watches and we wait for your husband to get home and kill me (spoiler alert).”

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Did I mention the guy is dressed like a tiger? This is a pretty transparent case of a director having an image of something f’d up in his head for his movie, and then doing a pretty weak job of justifying it. Pedro, Pedro. We all know you wanted her to be R’d by a guy dressed as a tiger, then found a guy and a reason for him to be dressed like a tiger. This is what I’m talking about. The tiger thing never goes anywhere. He doesn’t, like, leap into the tall grass when Banderas gets home, making him incredibly hard to see (note to Hollywood: THAT ONE’S ON THE HOUSE). As far as I can tell, Almoldovar dressed him up as a tiger because seeing a girl get R’d while the R-ist’s mother watches on a screen is .09% more f’d up if the R-ist is dressed like a tiger, and Almodovar is all about maximizing the f’d-upedness of this movie.

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So then, just after Banderas’s mom’s long-ass story, we get a “six-years ago” sequence that takes FOREVER and sort of justifies why a girl would be locked in her room only to be R’d. Banderas has a crazy daughter (fine) whom they let out to socialize at a party (sure) only for her to be drawn into the garden by a drugged up European guy (they’re all European, it’s a Spanish film, you’re just saying that because he wore tight suit pants better than you ever will) and sex-by-surprised, Assange-style (what?). For what it’s worth, the guy made a mistake. Not like OJ made a mistake and got caught up in his bad day and murdered some folks. Like, he didn’t force himself upon her at all, she just suddenly snapped out of her crazy-girl haze that he mistook for like-minded “partying” and started screaming, at which point he promptly stopped (correct move). I respected this complication of the audience’s emotional identifications, as it makes him less of a deserving bad guy, but then I realized that it was only to make him MORE of a victim.

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So Banderas chains up the sex-by-surprise artist, starves him, and then… I GUESS YOU’LL HAVE TO SEE ;-(. But the big twist gets telegraphed, big-time. You find out that Banderas is going to _____ the kid, and then you watch it happen for like 20 minutes, and then there’s this reveal, at which point you’re like, “yeah, we know.”

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And then there’s the third act, in which the beautiful actress (who is also very good) pulls the old Stockholm-Syndrome Switcheroo and ices the mad scientist and also his mother (because loose ends, that’s why). And then in what is sort of an awesome ending, the girl leaves the mad scientist’s lair, and does EXACTLY WHAT SHE SHOULD DO, which is find her loved ones, explain exactly what happened in like four sentences, and then FREAK THE FUCK OUT.

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So. That’s what happens. I give THE SKIN I LIVE IN an enthusiastic “See it if you want to see it!”

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Oh, and another thing that distracted me: Antonio Banderas kind of looks like my uncle.