How messed up is "The Skin I live In"?

[Droford]

first, a rather bland description:

Based on Thierry Jonquet's novel "Mygale", this revenge tale tells the story of a plastic surgeon on the hunt for the men who raped his daughter.Now..that doesn't seem like anything we haven't seen before. But wait..it gets better..


Spanish director Pedro Almodovar's latest thriller, "The Skin I Live In," had filmgoers fleeing the theater Thursday night at its gala premiere at the Cannes Film Festival, due to some aggressively violent and disturbing content.
The film, which stars Antonio Banderas (http://www.foxnews.com/topics/entertainment/movies/actors/antonio-banderas.htm#r_src=ramp) and budding actress Spanish actress Elena Anaya, focuses on a mad but brilliant surgeon (Banderas) who kidnaps a man who raped his daughter.
The doctor's daughter killed herself from the grief and it drives him to take very drastic measures. This is where it gets complicated and disturbing.
Banderas then gives the rapist a sex change and transplants his deceased daughter's face onto his body.
He later has sex with the man he has brutally experimented on and turned into a woman.


Ive seen some pretty messed up stuff, but seriously..I can't imagine who in their right mind would come up with a book with the idea "the father of a girl thats raped and then kills herself goes off to catch her rapists, give them a sex change, put his dead daughters face on the woman and the fuck the daughter/rapist mashup", let alone anyone that would want to make this into a movie and even worse anyone that would want to be in it..Is the work just not coming in for ol Antonio anymore? Seriously?

I just dont know anymore..

[Fignuts]

lol

[Jura]

Cool

[Snowden]

Kinda wanna watch that.

[Fox]

I want to watch it simply for the "what the fuck" factor - like the same reason I watched "Cannibal Holocaust."

[mitch_h]

Pedro Almodovar is one of the best filmmakers working today, so the film won't be some shitfest like Cannibal Holocaust, he also pay homage to a lot of classic films and this sounds a little like Franju's excellent "Eyes Without a Face". Anyway this was just at Cannes and I believe the overall reception was pretty positive, def one of my most anticipated movies of the year.

[LuigiD]

Huge Almodovar mark. Can't wait to see this. The only problem with Almodovar is that I never know which film to consider his best.

[mitch_h]

Talk to Her is his masterpiece, IMO.

[VSG]

Sounds great

[Kris P Lettus]

Human Centipede

[Hanso Amore]

I just came.

[Hanso Amore]

Also, Where did you get this? Every other listing for this film I see is this

Based on Thierry Jonquet's novel Tarantula, The Skin I Live In tells the story of a surgeon who tries to create a new human skin.[1] Almodóvar describes the film as "a horror story without screams or frights".[2] The accomplished surgeon Robert Ledgard succeeds to cultivate a skin which can withstand any kind of assault; such a skin would have been able to save his wife, who was burned in a car crash twelve years earlier. To his help, Ledgard has an accomplice, Marilia, and a human guinea pig.[3]

[Downunder]

Like Hanso - I don't know where you came up with that film description Droford.

http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/05/19/us-review-skinilive-idUSTRE74I81F20110519

Cannes film review: "The Skin I Live In"

CANNES, France (Hollywood Reporter) - As implausible as it might seem, the cinema world of Pedro AlmodÛvar just got stranger in "The Skin I Live In" ("La Piel Que Habito"). Along with such usual AlmodÛvar obsessions as betrayal, anxiety, loneliness, sexual identity and death, the Spanish director has added a science-fiction element that verges on horror. But like many lab experiments, this melodramatic hybrid makes for an unstable fusion. Only someone as talented as AlmodÛvar could have mixed such elements without blowing up an entire movie.

With Antonio Banderas returning to the fold to play the mad-scientist protagonist, Sony Pictures Classics is assured that more than the AlmodÛvar faithful will show up for its North American release. Reactions will vary, as it's hard to tell just how much of this is being delivered with tongue-in-cheek panache or how emotionally invested the auteur is in his Dr. Frankenstein character.

That doctor would be Banderas' character, Dr. Robert Ledgard, an eminent plastic surgeon and university researcher. As befits his profession, Robert looks like he stepped out of the pages GQ. Yet his face conveys a sense of dark purpose. And he works out of a clinic in his own suburban, highly isolated and secure compound outside Toledo.

He presents colleagues with a paper indicating he has been researching the creation of a new and better, stronger skin that considerably bends the boundaries of bioethics. The audience by this point is well aware that confined within his mansion is a young woman, Vera (Elena Anaya), who is being molded — there is no other word for it — to the doctor's specific requirements. And that would be to largely resemble his late wife, who was burned beyond recognition in a car crash and chose to die rather than to live in such ruined skin.

Vera wears a skin-colored body stocking like a second skin and spends much of the time in a series of yoga positions. These help her to reach an inner core of selfhood the doctor can never touch.

Then a man in a tiger costume (Roberto Alamo) breaks into the house. He's in tiger skin because it's Carnival time, but you suspect AlmodÛvar would have found any excuse to put him into that costume to achieve the image of a tiger on the prowl for Vera.

There is first a sexual and then a violent encounter, which leads to revelations about the relationship between the doctor and the tiger-man, and between the men and Robert's housekeeper (Marisa Paredes). Then the movie flashes back six years, which introduces two more characters, Robert's daughter (Blanca SuÖrez) and a local youth (Jan Cornet) who sets his sights on the young, emotionally fragile woman while he is high on pills at a party....

etc etc

[Droford]

http://themovieblog.com/2011/05/review-the-skin-i-live-in-cannes-film-festival


THE GENERAL IDEA
Based on Thierry Jonquet’s novel “Mygale”, Robert Ledgard (Banderas) plays a brilliant plastic surgeon determined to develop a new artificial skin. Many obsticles stand in his way, but after his daughter is raped and commits suicide in the resulting depression, Ledgard sees an opportunity for revenge and an unwitting test subject.

THE GOOD
And the best villains in film are the ones you can sympathize with. Evil for the sake of evil lacks any depth. This is not a criticism that this film will ever face. Banderas’ character is the victim. Distraught by his daughter’s traumatic ordeals, seeking revenge he crosses a line and becomes evil. The film as a whole is VERY deep, disturbing, and moving. I say this as a good thing, as every disturbing moment makes you explore why, share in its emotion and impacts the viewer dramatically.

THE BAD
This film may just be a tough pill to swallow for some. Its not a feel good revenge movie like Taken. This movie takes no subtleties in the exploration the most base of human emotion. Even at the Cannes Film Festival where people covet these tickets and attended the film alongside the cast and director, some walked out on the movie (http://www.foxnews.com/entertainment/2011/05/20/fox-411-cannes-horrified-viewers-flee-antonio-banderas-new-flick-extreme-sex/) for reasons ranging from confusion to pure disgust.
There are also some very dry parts in the middle of the film that drag, and a particularily confusing “tiger rape” scene involving a man in a furry like costume. I didn’t feel it gave anything to the film and could have been left out without hurting they story. And believe me that when that happens its not the part that people were talking about when they say “it got weird after that”.

From the link in that quote:

The film, which stars Antonio Banderas (http://www.foxnews.com/topics/entertainment/movies/actors/antonio-banderas.htm#r_src=ramp) and budding actress Spanish actress Elena Anaya, focuses on a mad but brilliant surgeon (Banderas) who kidnaps a man who raped his daughter.
The doctor's daughter killed herself from the grief and it drives him to take very drastic measures. This is where it gets complicated and disturbing.
Banderas then gives the rapist a sex change and transplants his deceased daughter's face onto his body.
He later has sex with the man he has brutally experimented on and turned into a woman.

Read more: http://www.foxnews.com/entertainment/2011/05/20/fox-411-cannes-horrified-viewers-flee-antonio-banderas-new-flick-extreme-sex/#ixzz1NE4sTKKV

[Jura]

The wife thing makes more sense if you've seen the trailer.

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[screech]

Looks like it'd be an interesting watch.

[Hanso Amore]

Yeah, so basically Dro got some bad info and shared it.

Not like this is the first time.

[Downunder]

Yeah, so basically Dro got some bad info and shared it.

Not like this is the first time.

http://www.foxnews.com/entertainment...#ixzz1NE4sTKKV

well there's a surprise

[Droford]

I dont know how the guy that wrote for that blog that actually saw it is "bad info" and I dont get why he would link to the story if it wasn't true.

but anyway

[Jura]

The premise in the original post is actually accurate except for the daughter's face thing. It was actually his wife's face he made the patient take on. The second premise is accurate too because the movie has layers to it and either one could have worked.

Overall the movie was kind of confusing at first because the events seemed out of order but it got better in the second half.