ARMOND WHITE: "EVOKES THE NARRATIVE FLOW OF 'FEMME FATALE'..."
Armond White states that with The Skin I Live In, Pedro Almodóvar has made a horror film that "is the most self-conscious, intellectually ambitious film yet from a director who has previously used self-consciousness in the form of camp irony." White mentions Luis Buñuel and Brian De Palma as partial influences:I’ve avoided plot details because Skin would not synopsize well. But it’s full of feeling—a genuine art experience, even when Almodóvar fights his own conceits. Villainy and martyrdom overlap, as do dream and terror. That’s why the film embraces Buñuel’s acerbity yet neglects his humor, evokes the narrative flow of De Palma’s Femme Fatale then shrinks from the omniscience that De Palma synthesized out of Hitchcock, Michael Powell and Warhol.
Others have noted a De Palma influence on The Skin I Live In. DVD Talk's Jason Bailey concludes that a De Palma comparison doesn't hold water, yet his argument suggests structural links to De Palma's Femme Fatale:
The Skin I Live In has been diagnosed in countless reviews as the Spanish filmmaker's homage to Hitchcock, and on the surface, that's true enough; you can hear it in Alberto Iglesias's gloriously, almost deliriously over-the-top score, and you can see it in the dirty kick of certain scenes that alternately call to mind Hitch and his cinematic pupil, Brian De Palma.
But the picture is just too damn strange for those comparisons to hold water; Almodovar lets his narrative get out of his control in a way that those filmmakers seldom did. He takes an interesting structural strategy, basically starting out in the middle of the story, then taking the second act to catch us up (at one point, from two different points of view). It's a risky storytelling gamble, and one that doesn't always pay off--he certainly keeps you guessing, but we get the unnerving feeling, at times, of merely having our chains pulled.
The A.V. Club's Noel Murray and Scott Tobias suggest a cross between Cronenberg and De Palma, while a discussion last May at Plunderphonics brought in comparisons to De Palma's Femme Fatale and Body Double.
Updated: Wednesday, November 16, 2011 12:02 AM CST
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