Life after death
Buddhism sees the body as a simple container of the spirit which should aim the self deliverance from the chain of pain that is life. This requires not believe in the senses as they distort us reality and contribute to build desires that cling us to the painful life. Pedro Almodóvar has entered this chain of prisons, prejudice and pain in his recent film La piel que habito (2011), leaving the skin to the elements.
Pedro Almodóvar's filmography is as far from that initial Folle, folle,fólleme ... Tim (1978) filmed in Super 8 and the following Pepi, Luci, Bom y otras chicas del montón (1980) full of corruption, abuse, prostitution, drugs , sex and humor that reached its climax in the golden shower on a nun. They were the turbulent years of the young Spanish democracy which boiled artistically in the city of Madrid when Pedro Almodóvar was one of its main figures in movies, music, design and painting, mean while the most irreverent theatre wake up in Barcelona.
Since that artistic movement called Movida Madrileña, Almodóvar’s cinema has grown to the point of great filmic jewels like La ley del deseo (1986), Mujeres al borde de un ataque de nervios (1988), ¡Átame! (1989), Todo sobre mi madre (1999), Volver (2006) and the current La piel que habito, in which Almodóvar has tried to create a cold terror. “There are irreversible processes, ways of no return, one-way travels."La piel que habito" tells the story of one of these processes. The protagonist travels involuntarily one of those roads, she is violently forced to take a trip that can not return. His Kafkaesque story corresponds to the dictates of a sentence whose jury is composed of a single person, his worst enemy. The verdict, therefore, is an extreme form of revenge. "La piel que habito" is the story of the revenge”.
His aestheticism inherited from Douglas Sirk plays into this story of revenge that ends up being a slow combustion of apparently distant beings but inevitably intersect. The scenes are in a slow vision and the coldness Almodóvar wants to create to his pictures lies in the millimeter symmetrical frames and the music composed by Alberto Iglesias who ends up trapping us in a narrative that takes us back to his classic ¡Átame! even it’s now closer to the classic film Peeping Tom (1960) by Michael Powell for its most squalid tone, surrounding vital prisons always with a corner open to the most black humor. It’s a totally open skin.
Text by Juan Carlos Romero
Photos by José Haro.© El Deseo, Courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics.