Death of a Family

Saturdays are usually the most satisfying time of the week for me. It's the day for various talks, concerts and meals with good friends. Yesterday was particularly so. I had my last lesson and then a graduation ceremony for my elementary course on Islam. It was followed by an excellent film and a very satisfying meal. The film is about a series of family tragedies in the form of a thriller in which not a single member of that family survived. Each died for a different but related reason. It was adapted and directed one of my favourite directors, Pedro Almodóvar Caballero. It was "La piel que habito" (The Skin which I live) (2011), starring Antonio Banderas, Elena Anaya, Marisa Paredes, Jan Cornet, Roberto Álamo and Blanca Suárez. It's based on a French novel, Thierry Jonquet's Tarantula which Almodóvar described as "a horror story without screams or frights". It premiered in May  last year at the 64th Cannes Film Festival.

The film opens with a lecture by a famous Spanish surgeon Robert Ledgard (Antonio Banderas) about the discovery of the wonderful effects of a new kind of skin which he cultivated in his private research lab, a skin membrane developed from certain animal cells which he described as near perfect because not only was it tougher than human skin and was able to sustain even fire burns, it was also mosquito (the carrier of malaria) repellent. After the talk, we see Robert asking his hospital chief for permission to use the new animal skin on some hospital patients coupled with certain gene alteration and was given clear indications that it would be absolutely prohibited. Then the camera switches to a huge screen in which we see a beautiful young lady in a tight fitting protective surgical dress closely hugging the contours of her body with her head bent from the arm rest of a sofa, face upward, doing some kind of yoga exercise. She was in a large windowless room. All her movements were monitored by an old lady from a huge LED screen in a kitchen. The young lady, called Vera Cruz ( Elena Anaya) requested for some food and reading materials through an inter-com on the wall.The food was delivered to her through one of those metal inter-floor food delivery systems working through a specially constructed little shaft with an opening for the insertion and removal of the relevant food item from the metal tray at respectively the delivering and recipient floors. Then we are shown new skin being delivered to the surgeon. The delivery man told him that it was freshly taken from a live animal. Next we see Robert donning his surgical gloves and grafting the skin on to the young lady and told her that it was quite successful and that in a few months time, the whole process would be completed. Then we hear a conversation between the surgeon and the old lady, Marilia (Marisa Paredes) in which she told him that the experiment could not go on any further and that the girl must be killed and if not, it had now reached the stage when all his domestic helpers at his home cum research laboratory and surgery should be dismissed, an advice which he took.

Next we see a figure in a carnival tiger outfit appearing outside the surgeon's TV-monitored and high security home cum research facilities. He asked for permission to see a girl there but was told that the girl was no longer working there. Then he lowered his pants and showed his bottoms to the old lady through the spy-eye of the TV monitoring system and then said he was Zeca, the old lady's son. He begged for permission to come in because he was hungry. The old lady relented and but told him to go away as soon as he had eaten. Then Zeca ( Roberto Álamo) told her that he was wanted by the police in connection with a bank robbery and that but for the carnival, in which people are supposed to dress up in carnival costumes, he would probably not have been able to make the escape and asked whether he could stay for a few days. His mother flatly rejected his request. Then by accident, he saw the huge TV monitoring screen in the kitchen and  the beautiful young lady behind it. It looked like Robert's former wife, his ex-lover. He went up to the screen to kiss her. Then he went up to her room but could not get in. He returned and asked his mother for the key. She refused and took out a gun from a drawer and wanted to shoot him but was overpowered. He gagged and tied her up and threatened to kill her unless she told him where the key to the room was. She succumbed. He went up, tore away Vera's protective surgical dress and violated her. The surgeon returned, saw the rape, went up, aimed the gun at Zeca and then at Vera, hesitated a little and then shot Zeca. During the disposal of his body, Robert was told by Vera that that in fact, Zeca was his half brother by another man and that even Robert himself was not the son of what he thought was his mother and that in fact, she was his father's maid at the time Robert was conceived but neither he nor Zeca knew. She said both Robert and Zeca got a streak of madness in them and that they probably got it from her.

As the film developed we learned that 12 years ago,Robert's wife had had a car accident in which Zeca escaped but she was burned alive until she almost died. Robert was devastated but did all he could to save her and out of love for her, he experimented with all sorts of skin graft to repair her burnt skin and by a superhuman dedication, he succeeded, well almost, because despite all his efforts, once she was sufficiently recovered to get up and hear her daughter Norma ( Blanca Suárez) singing a song she taught her as a child in the garden beneath her window, she moved towards it. In the process of trying to look at her daughter, she saw her own reflection on the window pane as she was trying to open it. She was horrified by what she saw and there and then jumped out of the window to her death. Norma was traumatised and had to seek psychological help. And six years ago, when she was considered sufficiently recovered, she was brought by her father out from the psychiatric hospital, to a wedding of a friend and there, she was subjected to an attempted rape by Vincente(Jan Cornet ). She resisted with all her might. We see Vicente adjusting her dress and leaving. When she woke up, she saw her father, probably as a result of all the psychotic drugs she had taken before the party, she mistook him for being the rapist or attempted rapist. Whatever the truth may be, she was shocked and traumatised for a second time and eventually followed the footsteps of her mother and jumped out a window to her death. Then we see how shortly after the attempted rape, Vicente was abducted
whilst riding a motor bike, got chained by his ankles and wrists to an
underground cell and eventually brought to the surgical table by Robert
and had his sex transformed by the removal his male sex organ, had a new
breasts and vulva put in and had his face remodeled into Robert's beautiful but deceased wife. But all the while, Vicente never relented. Everyday,
he would ask the old lady what day it was and would write it on the
wall with a pen and after the date, he would write the word "respiro"
meaning "I breathe/I am breathing" until almost the entire wall was
filled with dates and the word "respiro". To help her/his mental balance, Robert introduced Vicente/Vera to the practice of yoga and  Vincente/Vera assiduously did all the necessary body postures and movement
required and appeared to be doing them quite well. Vincente/Vera's face had now been remodelled into that of the surgeon's wife and was given cosmetics which Vincente/Vera had no hesitation in using.

The time has come when the sex transformation and plastic surgery was complete and Robert had to decide whether to let her out. His mother advised against it. Robert however had confidence that Vera will not run away. She was let out and returned, just in time to save Robert from disciplinary action by the Spanish medical authorities because his friend and colleague Fulgencio (Eduard Fernández ) was having some qualms about continuing to provide him with papers to continue his experiment after reading a missing person report in the newspaper in which he recognized the face of Vincente as one of the missing persons. Vera told Fulgencio that what she was not kidnapped and that she underwent the sex operation and thereafter remained with Robert on her own free will.

In the next scene, we are shown Robert trying to make love to Vera but she declined on the pretext that her vulva was still hurting from the rape by Zeca but she promised him that she would do so the following day. When Robert resumed the interrupted love-making the next day, Vera pulled the  trigger on him. Marilia saw what happened on the monitor screen, took out a pistol and entered the room. But when she arrived, Vera was nowhere to be found. Then a hand with a pistol  appeared under the bed, aimed it at Marilia. It was Vera. She shot her. We next see Vera going back to his/her mother's shop. She was met by Christina (a lesbian who earlier rejected his proposal to go with him to the same wedding where he later was shown trying to violate Norma), sent by his/her mother to serve him and told her that "she" was Vincente. Christina could not believe her eyes. He then asked  Christina if she recognized the floral lacey dress "she" offered to Christina in response to which Christina then said she did not like it and which she told Vincente to wear himself if he liked it so much. She then knew it really was Vicente because at the time they had the conversation, they were all alone. She was speechless. The film ends with the surprised looks of Vincente's mother's face and on that of Christina and an image of the double-helix in steely blue. Is Almodóvar suggesting that contemporary film need not always be what Fellini said about Italian films: " a mere pretext for filling two hours of entertainment on commercial television with an unrecognizable pap of cinematic images." Is he suggesting that nature may be stronger than nurture? Is he suggesting that love may be the undoing of hatred?

It was a film about life, death and the love between a man and a woman, a mother and her two sons, a father and her daughter. It is also a film about creativity and destruction, loss and discovery of self-identity, the hazy boundaries between surface civility and the violence that lurks beneath the surface, between reason and instincts, between love and hate, the grief of a husband for his wife, a father for his daughter, the love of a mother for her two sons, and how the paradox of life is that for certain specimens of our species, sometimes hate may be transformed into love by the silent and insidious work of time through constant physical contact whilst for others the trauma of a forced sex transformation may in turn become the motivation for a brutal and calculated killing which completes the circle of violence and death within and outside the family. Human desire and emotions are never simple. I like skilful way Almodóvar treats the complexity of human motives, feelings and their relations with desires and the conventionally accepted types of social relationships. There is thus not only entertainment but also plenty of food for thought in Almodóvar's films.

Almodóvar was superb in the way he handled the photography, with plenty of Bergman-like close ups on the human face and eyes, the laconic use of the glistening coldness of the stainless steel surface of surgical equipment for the storage of blood and the hard and brittle light from the surface of glass syringes, his constant shots on different kinds of dresses: surgical robes, rubber gloves, body-bugging protective surgical tunic, the dresses in Vincente's mother's ladies fashion boutique, the suit and tie worn by Robert at the wedding, the flimsy purple dress worn Norma at the wedding, the maid's uniform worn by Marilia, the carnival tiger outfit worn by Zeca, the dresses which Vicente was constantly pinning and clipping on to a straw cross at the show window of his mother's boutique and all the dresses at the clothes rack which are supposed to transform a woman's appearance by giving her a different style, a different feel and perhaps a different facet of her personality. The title of the film "The skin which I wear " is also suggestive. The word "habito" in Spanish can mean "live" "inhabit" or "wear" and has connotations of a monk's or a nun's "habit". Is Almodóvar suggesting that we may not necessarily be what we "appear" to the eyes of the others and that beneath the "dress" or our "skin", we could be the subject of numerous ambiguous yet potent forces: which may lead to love, hatred and violence and even deaths and that our "rationality" is only skin deep?

The story, inspired by Georges Franju's Eyes Without a Face and the
thriller films of Fritz Lang, when Almodóvar wrote the screenplay, was neatly divided into four parts. The present, a flash back to 12 years ago, the time when Robert nursed his wife back to health until her suicide, then six years ago, when the "rape" of Norma by Vincente occurred and her death, then the final part back to present when Robert set Vera free and gambled that she loved him too. Robert lost the gamble. It was a very tight dramatic and suspenseful framework as step by the step the mystery about Robert's family was revealed .The Hitchkok-like suspense was sustained very well indeed. The decor of Robert's home, with its huge paintings of women without faces is also suggestive. The atmosphere of the film is further enhanced at critical points by the use of the wonderful music of Alberto Iglesias. The Antonio Banderas, Elena Anaya and Marisa Paredes are superb in their respective roles as Robert, Vera and Marilia. I like the way he composed his cinematic images with his very sensitive use of colors and forms. It is always a pleasure to see films by a master.