Unholy in Toledo: The Skin I Live In

Let’s be clear about something: the title of Pedro Almodóvar’s 1987 film Law of Desire is both emblematic and entirely cheeky with regards to this filmmaker’s singular body of work. There are no laws where Almodóvar’s characters’ desires are concerned—at least none that can’t be broken in the spirit of audacity, subversion, showing off, or compulsive plot-twisting—just an immaculately crafted blur of reptile-brain urge and wild ambition, a confusion of longing, desperation, memory and gender.

His latest film, an adaptation of Thierry Jonquet’s 1995 novel Tarantula, plunges into some as yet uncharted (by Almodóvar at least) and especially unsettling territory, with the innovative, fabulously resourceful and seriously messed up plastic surgeon Robert Ledgard (Antonio Banderas, back with the writer/director who made his name for the first time in two decades) plumbing the unexplored depths of posthuman sciences in his efforts to restore order to his shattered family. There’s a beautiful young woman sequestered and constantly monitored in his rural Toledo home and laboratory. She’s both a captive, stolen away from a whole other life, and something invented. The mad doctor is, in a sense, building himself a new wife. He is attempting to recover a dead life. Most interestingly, his endeavour is driven by the conviction that all that makes us who we are is infinitely malleable once we start to tinker with the outside. The external, he believes, determines the external. And to be sure, in Almodóvar, surfaces really do matter.

Given such a premise, The Skin I Live In (La piel que habito) is often extremely creepy. It’s also perhaps a little too cool and clean and clinical, too bogglingly plotty and over-calculated to truly love, but the highly composed grand design has things to ponder, revisit and re-admire. (Like Hitchcock, Almodóvar makes movies that even when flawed are tough to truly exhaust.) The source material aside, the obvious model for this macabre tale of obsession, isolation and transformation is the great 1960 French horror film Eyes Without a Face, directed by Georges Franju, who also made a movie about an abattoir that has to be seen to be believed, or has to be seen to know how much you probably wish you didn’t see it. Most Almodóvar has very clear roots in earlier, beloved, canonical films, but this one doesn’t accentuate homage with much warmth, and there are only a few fits of his characteristic humour. (One highly memorable and totally appalling example of this includes an uneasy reunion between Redgard’s assistant and some guy in a tiger costume.)

I feel like I keep wanting to warn you all about what The Skin I Live In lacks, but the truth is that despite all that I was still totally engaged with it, and some months after first seeing it, I’m easily lured into thinking about it, drawn into conversations about it. It’s fleshy, prompts goosebumps, and gets under the skin.

Vivre le peau nouveau: Eyes Without a Face

Firstly, it’s a movie consumed with surfaces: a woman in a shiny black leather raincoat stalks Paris in an equally slick, black, beetle-like Citroën; black water at night swirling like an abyss; trees along a roadside at night awash in an x-ray glow of headlights; a carefully-placed pearl choker of milky white; stainless steel medical equipment that reflects hard light in its immaculate cleanliness; a satin gown that renders the wearer a perfect little doll, one whose face is encased in a smooth, immobile mask devoid of human flaw; and in that mask a sight so tragic and gruesome that the frozen camera can’t turn away, can only mercifully fade to black.

Originally released to much outrage and disgust in 1960, George Franju’s Eyes Without a Face (Les Yeux sans visage) was too well crafted to be dismissed as just another exploitation horror flick. Nobody seemed to know what to do with it, and so it was destined to achieve its classic status only gradually. It's still absolutely chilling and quite singular, a skin-crawling tale of obsession, arrogance and murder both lyrical and clinical. As Carlos Clarens wrote in his 1967 Illustrated History of the Horror Film, with only his second feature (after numerous shorts and documentaries), Franju had lit upon “the elusive alliance of poetry and terror.”

Doctor Génessier (Pierre Brasseur) works in a clinic near his sprawling estate outside Paris. Though highly regarded for his advances in plastic surgery, Génessier has withdrawn from social life following the disappearance of his daughter Christiane (Edith Scob), who literally lost her face in an accident in which Génessier was the driver. Everyone, her fiancé included, assumes Christiane has suicided; she’s in fact secretly confined in her father’s mansion, awaiting the experimental surgery that her father has promised will give her back her face, surgery requiring the face of another, unwilling, donor.

Synopses don’t suit Eyes Without a Face. The story, simple as a fairy tale, builds at a deliberate pace, offering information in short doses and building suspense with little exposition. Early scenes in which Génessier’s devoted assistant Louise (Alida Valli of The Third Man) prowls the Latin Quarter, smoking cigarettes and sizing up young women are presented ambiguously, and Franju gives an ominous degree of attention to simple movements through doors, down corridors, up stairs, as though our sense of architecture were essential to our understanding of the drama silently unfolding. It’s weird, and through its unsettling weirdness works very well.

I mentioned surfaces: the cold brilliance of this story, cleanly adapted by the team of Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac (Les Diaboliques, Vertigo) from Jean Redon’s novel, lies in our peculiar attachment to our faces, that body part most closely associated with our sense of identity, thus the surface reflects unseen depths. But ironically, though Franju lingers on many faces throughout, its probably Christiane’s mask that, while unspeakably creepy, is also the most affecting face in the movie. Animated only by voice and gestures made by her thin limbs, the mask becomes a haunted and haunting thing, with Scob constituting the movie’s closest thing to a truly sympathetic person.

Uncontrollable and uncooperative, flesh itself is an independent force in Eyes Without a Face, a sort of precedent for David Cronenberg’s flesh-driven films. But by the wondrous, beautiful final images, aflutter with newly released doves, dogs and leaves caressed by evening breeze, we see that Eyes Without a Face is also about the spirit, adrift in a world full only of imperfect houses in which in can dwell.