Skin Flick

After I got home from seeing The Skin I Live In (2011), Pedro Almodovar's new film, I sat down at my computer and started to peruse the film's reviews. I do this sometimes when I'm trying to clarify my thoughts on something that I've just seen. Sometimes it's helpful. Sometimes its not. The reviews of The Skin I Live In fall into the latter category. Most of them get tangled up in the "twist," while others trot out words like "perverse," "kinky," and "twisted." Most of them catalog the film's many obvious touchstones (and I intend to do a little of that myself). Pedro does like his influences. Almost none of them treat with the central themes and problems of the film or what they suggest about its director. A twist will do that, I guess. As for the adjectives, well, I suspect that my own history inclines me to accept certain things as a matter of course.

I'm going to spoil the hell out of this movie. I thought I'd let you know that up front, because there's no way I can talk about what I want to talk about without spoiling it. If you're someone who hasn't seen the film and doesn't want it "spoiled," then stop reading now. You have been warned. For myself, I don't think a legitimately good movie can be spoiled, but for the sake of politeness, I'll put the rest of this below the cut and insert a handy still from the movie as a bumper. From here on out, though, I won't be coy.

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Habitual Offenders

The challenge starts tomorrow, but I still have a couple of civilian movies to write about first. These will be brief:

Shinsengumi (1969, directed by Tadashi Sawashima) is a middling historical epic produced by star Toshiro Mifune. The story of the Shinsengumi, a band of ronin in the employ of the Tokugawa Shogunate right before the Meiji restoration is almost as popular in Japan as the story of the 47 Ronin. This is the sort of movie that's long on historical incidents that the movie assumes the audience knows about. They tend to be disconnected to the eyes of this gaijin observer, who is ignorant of the details. AnimEigo's DVD of the film includes their standard exhaustive program notes and good thing, too, because this film needs them more than most. Mifune plays Kondo Isami, the head of the Shinsengumi, an honorable man leading a band of less than honorable subordinates. Of his co-commanders, one is an epic drunk and the other commits seppuku after disgracing himself while out whoring at the Gion festival. Once he's on his own, he institutes an iron discipline that urges the band to feats of renown. Unfortunately, the Shinsengumi have backed the wrong horse, and at the end of the movie, Kondo sacrifices himself to allow his men to scatter as the Shogunate falls. The movie itself looks like any number of other chambara movies from the same era--it certainly throws in some gore for the groundlings--though it lacks the subversiveness of movies by Okamoto or Gosha. It does come briefly to life during two sequences: in one, the Shinsengumi's accountant is urged to commit seppuku over a 50 ryo shortfall. This is staged against a snowy backdrop the better to show the blood. In the second, at the very end of the movie, Kondo politely moves his pony tail so his executioner can have a better shot at his neck. But the rest of the movie is kind of a slog.

The Hot Rock (1972, directed by Peter Yates), in which sad sack professional thief John Dortmunder and his band of misfit accomplices must steal the Sahara diamond. And then steal it again. And then again. This is a comedy caper movie, and while Peter Yates directs this with anonymous efficiency and he makes good use of the wide screen in setting up his mayhem, it's the wrong tone. Donald Westlake's book is funnier than the movie, which is hard to explain given that they're as close to each other as any adaptation I can think of. Westlake wins on style points, I guess, though I think my own hang-up with the movie is that it's miscast in almost every particular. Robert Redford, especially, is just too damned good-looking to play a credible Dortmunder, who in personality is more like Bob Newhart than The Sundance Kid. George Segal and Ron Leibman are both actors who chew scenery, even when it's detrimental to the film, as it is here. As a purely personal reaction, I just read one of Westlake's Parker novels, the dark secret sharers of the Dortmunder novels, and it set up a curious double vision as I was watching this. Westlake famously wrote the book with Parker in mind, and, oddly enough, I can see Redford as Parker. Westlake was wise to invent Dortmunder, because I can totally see Parker just shooting everyone involved and having done with it.

Dark Habits (1983, directed by Pedro Almodovar), finds nightclub singer Cristina S. Pascual hiding from the mob among a demented order of nuns (including Almodovar regulars Carmen Maura and Marisa Paredes). What starts off as a kind of ur-Sister Act quickly becomes Pedro's take on nunsploitation. The Mother Superior is a lesbian and a dope fiend. One of the sisters is raising a tiger. Another is taking communion with LSD rather than the Eucharist. One surmises that Pedro saw in nunsploitation a progenitor of his female-centric melodramas, and you can see him working in that direction, but the director was still very much an enfant terrible when he made this, and some the elements he's assembled exist only for their prurient shock value. It's not one of his better movies. There is an uneasy dynamic between Alodovar the provocateur and Almodovar the artist here, which results in a film that's too sober in its mood for the gonzo subject matter. Still, it's eminently watchable, but it's probably for completists only.

Olé

Once upon a time, Pedro Almodovar was an enfant terrible. His early films were exercises in provocation and stylistic excess. Sometimes, they were pretty hard to put up with. A case in point is Matador, from 1986, which starts with a man masturbating to the violence in Mario Bava's Blood and Black Lace, then proceeds to tell a story of psychos in love. Diego has a problem: forcibly retired from the bullring after being gored by a bull, he still hungers for the kill. He satisfies this urge by murdering women after he's had sex with them. One of his students, Angel, has been driven mad by both crippling vertigo and his overly religious mother. After attempting to rape Eva, Diego's girlfriend, he claims responsibility fo the murders. Maria, the lawyer who takes Angel's case, has similar appetites as Diego, only her taste is for murdering matadors after having sex with them. Soon, Diego and Maria are circling each other in a deadly mutual attraction.

Early in his career, Almodovar took a LOT of heat for his cavalier approach to rape imagery, and this film is one of the ones that fuels that criticism. Angel's attempted rape in this movie is kinda sorta played for laughs. The character further faints at the sight of blood and is ridiculed by his victim for premature ejaculation. Still, this is all of a piece with this movie, in which every character has some kind of destructive sexual peccadillo. I think it's more destructive to the movie that it occasionally seems to pull elements out of its ass. For example: Late in the movie, Angel is shown to be psychic, which is how he knows the details of Diego's crimes. When this started to play out, all I could think was: "Wrote yourselves into a corner, did you?"

Still and all, Almodovar always mounts attractive films, whether through the design elements or through his choice of actors. You get both here, although the design of the film is very much of its time. Very 1980s. This movie is very much in love Antonio Banderas, who seems impossibly young (he was 26 at the time), but it's Asumpta Serna who walks away with the movie as the predatory Maria. The nominal lead, Nacho Martinez, kind of gets overwhelmed by this, but Almodovar has never had a lot of interest in middle-aged straight guys, so this might be inevitable.

Almodovar is also totally in love with movies, and like many of his other movies, this one is appointed with cinematic points of reference. I mentioned Bava already. There's also the scene where Diego first pursues Maria: they end up in a movie theater that's showing the end of Duel in the Sun, an equally deranged portrait of sexual obsession that foreshadows the end of this movie.

Floral Arrangements

I've been on kind of an Almodovar kick lately. I came late to the party with Almodovar, so I'm having to view some of his older films through the filter or his recent work. It's an interesting kind of parallax. I don't know that my old opinion of Almodovar was necessarily wrong, just that I wasn't seeing or wasn't "getting" what he was up to. In this regard, his 1995 movie, The Flower of My Secret is a kind of Rosetta Stone. It stands as a kind of nexus between his older films and his current, mature style. The director was always evolving towards a kind of Sirkian melodrama, even in his more outrageous earlier films, and here you can see him groping for the effects he would attain in over the next decade and a half. Hell, it sometimes seems like he had those films already written in his mind from the evidence of this film.

The movie itself concerns Leo, a romance writer who has become disillusioned with her work. She wants to write more realistic, more literary work, but her contract with her publisher prevents it. Compounding this problem is her disintegrating marriage with her absent husband, with whom she has raging fights after it becomes clear that he no longer wants her. On a whim, she takes her writing to the publisher of a newspaper and lands a gig reviewing her own latest novel, which she excoriates as "typing," a la Truman Capote's famous put-down of Jack Kerouac. Her editor at the newspaper, on the other hand, loves her romance novels (even though he doesn't know that she's the writer) and begins to fall for her.

The details of this movie are telling. Her best friend stages training performances for doctors to rehearse their bedside manners (this recurs in All About My Mother). The one performance we see concerns the mother of a boy who is in a persistent vegetative state (All About My Mother again for the grieving mother, and Talk To Her on the disposition of a boy in a coma). The dance sequence at the end also anticipates Talk to Her. And most telling of all is the plot of Leo's "literary" novel, in which a girl murders her father who is molesting her and her mother covers the crime by hiding the body at a friend's vacant restaurant (this is more or less the plot of Volver). During the course of the movie, these echoes of the future make it clear that Pedro has placed himself in the movie as multiple characters. Leo is certainly an avatar, as is Angel (her editor), and Antonio, who steals the idea of Leo's novel and sells it for movies. All of this is also evidence of a director who never throws anything away; a true auteur.

Unfortunately, this isn't one of Almodovar's better movies. Don't get me wrong: It's totally watchable. Compulsive, even. You want to know what happens next at any given point of its running time. The trouble with it is that none of the echoes of the future cohere into a satisfying narrative and when this finds its way to an ending, my first impulse was to ask, "That's it?" Almodovar falls victim to his own success, I think. The emotional content and the heights of melodrama presented earlier in the movie seem to cry out for some kind of epic catharsis of some kind. Instead, the movie kind of fizzles out, as if it wasted all of its fireworks and had nothing left for a finale.

Shock and Awe

The first time I encountered Shock (1946, directed by Alfred L. Werker), it was in a plagiarized form in E. C. Comics as "Mute Witness to Murder." Al Feldstein and Bill Gaines weren't above swiping their material wholesale when they were under the gun. They were pretty shameless about it. They only got caught once, I think, when Ray Bradbury called them out for it and started taking a piece of the pie. Anyway, "Mute Witness to Murder" showed up on HBO's Tales from the Crypt, too, starring Patricia Clarkson in the lead, and it's pretty good. It has an instinct for the jugular that's missing in the original. Shock was done on the cheap and features a depressing literalism. It's one of the founding films in the psychiatric ward noir (most recently on screens as Shutter Island), in which a woman witnesses a man murder his wife, goes catatonic, and discovers that the murderer is the psychiatrist charged with treating her catatonia.

For the most part, the movie's not worth going out of your way to see, save for one small detail: it stars Vincent Price. Price was in the ascent at the time, after toiling in supporting parts for other Fox films. With this film, and Dragonwyck from the same year, Price graduated to leading roles of a particularly sinister bent. This is one of the first urbane villains in his portfolio. He's not a horror star yet, but you could see the seeds of it. He pretty much steals Shock from everyone, in spite of playing a character who is fundamentally weak (a spiritual brother to his gigolo in Laura perhaps), and it's fun to watch him work.

Also of interest is a dream sequence toward the beginning of the film, one of those surreal phantasmagorias that were really the only genuine experimentation Hollywood indulged in during the classic period. Come to think of it, they're also a hallmark of the psychiatric noir, too (see also: Spellbound, Shock Corridor). This one, as I say, is depressingly literal-minded, and functions more as exposition than poetry.

Still and all, it's a fun movie that doesn't over-stay its welcome.

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Talk to Her (2002) might be Pedro Almodovar's most perverse film (and that's saying something). Mind you, it's a startling portrait of love and loss, but it also asks the question: if you were shrunk to the size of a couple of inches tall, would you climb into your lover's vagina only to be lost and smothered? This shows up in another of Pedro's films within a film, this time imagined as a striking silent movie recounted by one of the film's twin protagonists to his comatose patient/love object. I had to stop the movie for a short time because I was laughing so hard, which is a nice tonic to what is otherwise a fairly tragic movie.

The film follows two men in love with women who are comatose: Marco's girlfriend is a Lydia, a bullfighter who has a disastrous encounter in the ring. Benigno is a nurse caring for Alicia, a ballerina with whom he has been long obsessed. The two men strike up a friendship. Both men begin the movie watching a ballet in which a man moves chairs out of the way of a blind dancer, and both wind up in much the same position, caring for helpless women. Unfortunately, both men are headed for grief. Marco's girlfriend, he learns, was trying to break up with him at the time of her accident, favoring her ex-lover with the promise of marriage. Benigno, unfortunately, follows his obsession with Alicia over the cliff, raping her and getting caught because she becomes pregnant. He comes to a bad end.

The movie moves through successive layers of grief. It's kind of a shock to arrive at the end of the movie to discover that it has entirely healed that grief. There's a tantalizing hint of uplift that sends the viewer away happy. It's an amazing balancing act, made doubly difficult by the moral quagmires the movie sets up. Benigno is unquestionably a rapist, but does he see that in his mind? Can he help himself? The scenes where Benigno cares for Alicia have an elegant beauty and an uncomfortable jolt at the same time. And can the audience get behind Marco's loyalty to his friend? This could be a disaster in other hands, but Almodovar doesn't drop a single stitch.

And is there a filmmaker making as much use of widescreen as Almodovar? I can't even imagine a pan and scan version of this film. It's weird: I used to think that Almodovar was an empty stylist. In the last dozen years, though, I finally see the humanity behind the over-the-top colors, I finally feel the emotions evinced by the outlandish situations. His movies get more and more beautiful by and by.

Embracing Pedro

I've been mulling over Pedro Almodovar's Broken Embraces (2009) for about a week now. It's a film drunk on movies. It's as constructed of other movies as any Tarantino film, and like Tarantino--hell, MORE than Tarantino--Almodovar has internalized his sources and spit them out as his own inspiration. This movie is his 8-1/2 and his Peeping Tom all rolled into one and filtered through Bad Education. It has four basic narratives, including a film within a film remake of one of his own movies, all of them centered around a director whose memories of a life in film haunt him after his blindness. More to the point, though, it provides Penelope Cruz a role that embodies everything the director loves about actresses. She's his Audrey Hepburn, Claudia Cardinale, and Marilyn Monroe all rolled into one in this movie. The opening shot during the credits tells you everything: it watches Cruz as she prepares for a take. Like the Nouvelle Vague directors, Almodovar understands that movies were invented for gazing at beautiful women.

It's in its particulars, however, that the movie sings. There are two sex scenes that give lie to the notion that there are no new ways to film sex scenes. There is a shot of Lluís Homar and Cruz together on a beach that looks like an alien landscape that says almost everything about love and the photographic image, and there is a shot in which the fictional blind director frames his last kiss with his lover between his hands as it plays on a grainy video that might be my favorite shot in all of Almodovar's films. And the climax isn't a big reveal that ties up the film's mysteries--it leaves some danging loose ends, thankfully--but is rather the restoration of a murdered movie.

All of this is filtered through a kind of formal classicism that Almodovar has been drifting towards for a little more than a decade, though, like everything else, he's internalized it and converted it into his own cinematic anima. This film is a masterpiece when viewed through that lens: beautiful, enigmatic, complex, everything anyone could want from a movie. What I mostly take away from this movie is a desire to watch more movies. In this regard, it's a gift to me at a time when my need to watch movies has been at an ebb.