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Like shedding layers of skin, Almodóvar's latest narrative painfully unravels to reveal the rawness of losses that cannot be mourned. The skin - that ‘scrim’ on which we project our fantasies and fears (Mifflin, 1997) - is used here to good effect to examine deeply psychoanalytic themes. The title of the film takes its central character's profession - Dr Robert Ledgard (Antonio Banderas),
a tormented plastic surgeon - and turns it into a metaphor for exploring two central themes: the complex relationship between the given body and our identity and how trauma that cannot be reflected upon can be enacted through the modification of the body.
In characteristic Almodóvar fashion, as in Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! , High Heels (1991) and All About My Mother , this most recent offering emphasizes the human body as the site for the negotiation of identity and its traumatic collapse. The Skin I Live In is a timely film that gives pause for thought given contemporary culture's preoccupation with the body as a project (Giddens, 1991) within which it can be manipulated at will and without conscious acknowledgement of the developmental history imprinted on the body - one that, as this film powerfully reminds us, can never be erased no matter how extensive the transformation of the body.
The film's story is based on a French novel by Thierry Jonquet, Mygale, which was eventually turned into the horror film by Georges Franju (Eyes Without a Face), a surreal classic in which Dr Génessier (Pierre Brasseur), a plastic surgeon, becomes obsessed with grafting the faces of abducted Parisian girls onto his daughter who was disfigured in a car crash.
Almodóvar has imaginatively elaborated Jonquet's tale of perversion and relocated the narrative to Spain in the beautiful surroundings of Ledgard's minimalist and elegant home, El Cigarral. This is the stage for a private medical clinic with its own operating theatre: a stylized, sterile yet deadly version of Frankenstein's workshop of ‘filthy c