Under the Skin

The Spanish trailer for the new Pedro Almodóvar film, The Skin I Live In (shurely: The Skin in Which I Live) has been played at every film I've seen at Curzon cinemas for the past month or so, and it's really freaky. The only other Almodóvar film I've watched is Broken Embraces, which is also weird but haunting and engagingly complex.

The Skin I Live In mainly just seems pretty twisted and yet strangely compelling with Antonio Banderas playing a very smooth, suave and un-Zorro-like plastic surgeon with a troubled past. Or, as IMDb puts it, "A brilliant plastic surgeon, haunted by past tragedies, [who] creates a type of synthetic skin that withstands any kind of damage. His guinea pig: a mysterious and volatile woman who holds the key to his obsession."

I'm not sure which bits of the trailer freak me out the most: maybe the tongue, the masks/bandages and even the crash-test-dummy-like costumes worn by some of the characters. A rough translation is available on this IndieWire post. I quite like the soundtrack but it seems at odds with the rest of the trailer, which in part feels a bit like a James Bond movie from the 1970s, mashed up with some sort of sci-fi film. Weirdest of all, it doesn't star Penélope Cruz. I guess she was busy filming PoTC4; good call, Pen. Not.

NB: To see the embedded video, you might need to click through to my blog if reading this in Google Reader.