The new Pedro Almodovar/Antonio Banderas film has won the coveted "booed at Cannes" award. When you read the plot summary, you may well boo, too.
Spanish director Pedro Almodovar's latest thriller, "The Skin I Live In," had filmgoers fleeing the theater Thursday night at its gala premiere at the Cannes Film Festival, due to some aggressively violent and disturbing content.
The film, which stars Antonio Banderas and budding actress Spanish actress Elena Anaya, focuses on a mad but brilliant surgeon (Banderas) who kidnaps a man who raped his daughter.
The doctor's daughter killed herself from the grief and it drives him to take very drastic measures. This is where it gets complicated and disturbing.
Banderas then gives the rapist a sex change and transplants his deceased daughter's face onto his body.
He later has sex with the man he has brutally experimented on and turned into a woman.
Wow! And people call Europeans decadent!
Now, it could be that this is some sort of bloody-minded satire in the vein of American Psycho, so I reserve the right to reverse my disgust, but still...just because you can make a movie doesn't mean you actually have to. You have to wonder what you have to do to convince a beautiful woman like Elena Anaya to be in such a warped piece of work.
Reportedly, the people who fled the theater were a group of Americans who had won some sort of "dream vacation to the Cannes film festival" prize and ended up playing the role of bourgeois squares. The critics are busy acclaiming the above and practically demanding that it receive the Palm D'or.
a freind of mine described the plot of this movie to me and i was appalled... it wasnt until i read your article that i realised it was an Almadovar film... so i will now withold judgement until i can see it for myself... but like "Requiem for a Dream" this is sounding like a one time viewing, followed by years of " damn i just cant get that image out of my head"
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