the i who still breathes
by Douglas Messerli
Pedro Almodóvar (screenplay, based on a fiction by Thierry
Jonquet), Pedro Almodóvar (director) La piel que habito (The Skin I Live In) / 2011
Influenced to a certain degree by
Georges Franju’s elegant horror film, Les
yeux sans visage, Almodóvar’s langorous study of control
over another being takes us into a secret world of a tortured Frankenstein who,
with the advances of today’s science, can completely transform the human body.
Much like Franju’s Doctor Génessier, Robert Ledgard, heading an isolated clinic
and operating out of his house, has suffered the horror of seeing a wife
severely burned in an automobile accident, evidently caused by his
half-brother, the brutal and bestial Zeca, with whom she was having an affair.
Through patient nursing and the attentions of her doctor-husband, the wife
survives, but upon witnessing her burned shell of her body in the glass of a
window, she leaps to her death.
Robert (Antonio Banderas) is left with a daughter, Norma, who never
quite recovers from the shock of her mother’s death and is unable to deal
publicly with other people. As Robert and Zeca’s mother relays the news early
on in the movie, Norma follows the route of her mother, falling from a high
window of the institute where she had been committed.
He has, so it is hinted, made over the imprisoned girl somewhat in the
image of his dead wife, a fact for which his mother, serving as the head of
house and cook, despairs. Now that he has finished with her, she suggests, he
should destroy her instead of keeping her locked away in a room where she
reads, exercises, and, occasionally, writes upon the walls. She is a dangerous,
trapped being.
We recognize some of that potential danger when Zeca shows up at the
house on carnival night, dressed, absurdly, as a tiger, demanding that his
mother hide him for a few days since he has just been involved in a heist. The
mother, Marilia (Marisa Paredes) is outraged and quickly rejects any such
suggestion, and, accordingly, is tied up and gagged by her son. Glimpsing the
young lookalike wife of Robert on a television monitor, Zeca—a bestial figure
if there ever was one—frantically searches the house for the girl, and finding
the room, rapes her, Vera, strangely enough, both accepting the brutal action
and crying out in terrible pain.
Robert, returning home mid-rape, rushes to the room to shoot his
half-brother dead, while his mother below, screams out that he should kill them
both.
What follows is even stranger, as a sexual relationship suddenly
develops between Robert and Vera. And after he has destroyed Zeca’s body, he
returns to her bed. The implications are frightening: if she indeed looks like
his wife, has Vera been created merely for his sexual gratification? We are
never given an answer, but we sense something grandly amiss.
Almodóvar—as the director of Women
of the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown and other comedies—has often been
described as creating a frenetic or, at least, hectic pace in his works. But
here he almost lugubriously takes us back in time, retelling some of his tale,
and, in so doing, revealing new truths that are even more frightening than
those we already suspect.
Although she has had a difficult time with social relationships, Robert
takes his daughter to a pre-wedding party, where the young Norma seems to be
acclimating herself well to other young women her age. Suddenly, however, many
of the younger generation seem to be missing, and following their tracks,
Robert finds a group of them, boy and girls, in the middle of the woods,
engaging in group sex. His daughter is nowhere in sight.
We have already been introduced to a young man, Vicente, who works as a
window dresser in his mother’s second-hand dress shop. He has asked for the
young shop assistant to go with him to the party, but she turns him down,
evidently being more interested in women than in men. When he suggests she put
on a dress he is displaying, she disparagingly suggests he wear it himself. The
suggestion is that he may be gay, but he scoffs at her suggestion.
When he shows up at the party he has already ingested—as have the other
young people—a substantial number of drugs. Meeting the young Norma, he lures
her into the out-of-doors, asking her what drugs she has taken. Innocently, she
reports the numerous drugs she is being proscribed for her psychological
condition, while he interprets it in his own way:
Vicente: You are different. I am
different as well.
Norma: Are you
in therapy, too?
She, he is convinced will be a
willing participant in his experiment. As he takes off into the woods to have
sex, she grows frightened, screaming out, to which he responds by trying to
silence her, slapping her as he attempts to take her. She passes out, and he,
horrified, quickly redresses her and disappears from the event. Robert comes upon
her at that very moment, observing the boy on a motorcycle speeding away.
After the attack, Norma’s condition worsens. Locked away in a
sanatorium, she appears to grow sicker, hiding from her father upon each of his
visits. She, at least, has associated the young rapist with her own father, and
we must wonder if Robert has also sexually abused his daughter. He is asked to
no longer visit her, and soon after, as Marilia has already told us, she jumps
to her death.
Only a few frames later, the young handsome Vicente is kidnapped and
chained in a dark space for several days, fed only water and a little rice. We
comprehend Robert’s sense of revenge, but why is he torturing the youth? What
might possibly be gained?
Perhaps his mother, has said it best when she observed: “The things for
love a madman can do!”
One
of the most eerie scenes of the film occurs when we observe Robert spraying a
hose over the filthy Vicente, the boy convinced he is about to be murdered.
Gently and patiently, however, the handsome Robert almost lovingly shaves the
young man who, we soon discover, is about to undergo an operation. We can only
suspect the worst, but when the boy has awakened from the surgery, we discover
something even beyond the expected castration. He has replaced the boy’s
genitals with a vagina, producing various sizes of dildo’s with which the boy
is ordered to practice in order to help heal the crevice.
Without a few months, Robert has completed the sex change, as we witness
the young beauty, now Vera, after the transformation. Against his will he has
been made over by another from a man into a woman. At first, the patient lashes
out in rebellion filling the walls with words and numbers, dates of changes on
his body and the statement, over and over: “I breathe. I breathe. I breathe. I
know I breathe,” as if his very respiration, sign of his survival, were a reiteration
of the Decartesian principle, “I think, therefore, I am.”
Vera-Vicente even makes a trip with Marilia into town, but when Robert
and she attempt sex after her return, she insists that she has bought a lotion,
which she briefly leaves the room to retrieve. Upon her return she has brought
his gun, shooting him at close range near the heart. His almost poignant shock
at the turn of events reveals his insanity:
Robert Ledgard: You promised not to run away.
Vicente: I
lied.
As Mirilia climbs the stairs, gun in hand, to check out the
situation, she too is shot by the victim.
If the final
scene of Vera-Vicente’s return to his mother’s dress shop seems almost banal,
it is simultaneously an expression of immense courage and resilience, as the
young woman proclaims to his mother his true identity: Soy Vincente.
Los Angeles, November 16, 2011
Reprinted from Nth
Position [England] (December
2011).
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