I'm holding back my views of Almodovar's latest, The Skin I Live In, until nearer the release date. In the meantime I can't resist sharing some images of the film's female lead, Elena Anaya, who plays a woman held captive by a leading skin surgeon. Her captor is played by Antonio Banderas, returning to the director for the first time since 1990's Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! - in which, intriguingly enough, he also imprisoned a woman (played then by Victoria Abril).
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| Elena Anaya |
Anaya has an astonishing screen presence - her looks are the kind that stop you in your tracks. And she can act.
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| Elena Anaya |
If you saw Julio Medem's Sex and Lucia, she played the extraordinary looking young woman with the dangerously vicious dog. In Skin she plays a woman so beautiful that she scarcely seems real - but in just saying that I'm already in danger of wandering into an act of spoiler crime. Her looks - and the remarkable quality, in this film at least, of her skin - dovetail exactly into the film's major theme and plot, which revolve around surfaces, appearances.
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| Angelin |
Hollywood's idea of female beauty - or perhaps its audience's - often leaves me feeling cold though I think I understand what drives them. Julia Roberts and Angelina Jolie, two of the biggest icons of beauty, seem not so much attractive as freakish. Jolie in particular often projects a voracious cartoon of "sexy" womanhood that can too readily detract from her roles (those weird lips). The most European screen women still seem to have an elegance, style and poise - something that went out of Hollywood with Audrey Hepburn. Yes, another European. As were, in earlier eras, Greta Garbo (Swedish) and Marlene Dietrich (German).
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| Elena Anaya |
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| Anne Hathaway |
When I call Jolie and Roberts "freakish", I do not intend an idle insult. The notion of beauty depends on some statistical deviation from the norm, a physical quality that immediately marks out a person as unusual - lips, eyes and cheekbones more prominent than average. Anne Hathaway scores well in all those departments.
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| Julia Roberts |
To become a film star, the person has to possess not just intense charisma, but also unique features that mark out their face as instantly recognisable (acting ability is an advantage but time and time again has proven inessential). Idiosyncrasies are a blessing: in Jolie's case, pronounced lips and wide eyes; with Roberts, an unusually wide mouth (so that when she smiles, the effect can not help but be infectious - regardless of whether the viewer finds her looks attractive or not).
With Anaya, the size of the eyes is quickly noticeable. In the Almodovar film, the flawless quality of her skin is also readily apparent - something the director highlights via make-up and lighting and possibly post-production techniques (colour grading and possibly digital imaging).
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| Elena Anaya |
Her character's habitual wearing of a flesh-coloured body stocking - a second skin - also encourages viewers to pay close attention to her real skin.
Apart from being a luridly macabre melodrama, The Skin I Live In is a meditation on beauty, as well as an examination on sexual obsession and the male desire to mould, control, gaze upon and own the female body in contrasting ways - the wild (rape) and the rational and scientific (Banderas's surgeon). Feminist film theoreticians of the post-Laura Mulvey "male gaze" school will have a field day, as will queer film theorists - the latter for reasons I'll leave readers to discover when they get the chance to see the film in December.
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| Elena Anaya in The Skin I Live In |
