Tale of the unexpected | 27 August 2011

When I know I’m going to see a film, I like to prepare. I’ll watch the trailer. Then maybe the second trailer. Sometimes a featurette.

When I know I’m going to see a film, I like to prepare. I’ll watch the trailer. Then maybe the second trailer. Sometimes a featurette. I’ll read reviews, the director’s statement of intent, interviews with the cast. It’s a terrible habit, really, arming myself with this glut of information; it is difficult to avoid spoilers in among the noise and it makes me want to talk about it, often while it’s on. ‘Oh, this is the bit where that actress messed up her lines but they left it in because it was more “real”,’ is the kind of thing I try to stop myself saying. It irritates me. I can only feel sorry for the people I’m seeing the film with.

Happily, I didn’t get chance to do any of this before I saw The Skin I Live In, and if you can make an exception for this piece (I promise I won’t spoil it), I’d recommend you do the same. The latest work from Pedro Almodóvar, the Spanish director so revered by cinema-goers that his new films are almost never called his new films but his ‘latest work’, it’s the sort of thrillingly bonkers gothic fairy tale that Black Swan could have been, had it accepted its own hysterical campness rather than taking itself so seriously.

Which is not to say that The Skin I Live In is camp, though it has its moments, as the plot gets progressively more preposterous with delighted, demented precision. Where Broken Embraces, his last film (or work, if you insist), was a beautifully shot if meandering tale of love that once again used Penelope Cruz as the object of his affections, there is no such gentle touch here.