The Skin I Live In, Pedro Almodovar

The Skin I Live In, Pedro Almodovar, 118 mins, **half

As usual, Almodovar has a theme about sex and identity, family secrets, obsessions and perversions, with a very good singer scene in clubs.
This is a tale of taking a young man to have his sex changed without his consent - the actor is very fine featured like a young Richard Chamberlain but when he metamorphosed into this big eyed young girl - the face doesnt match. It would have been much more convincing to have the actor made up as a young woman? Or is it too much trouble? Eye size do not change like that so this is a big "easy way out" for the story to work. The actress has a v beautiful face and body. The body suits in nude skin tones are interesting clothing pieces. I have seen a beaded body suit in an exhibition of Almodovars films by Jean Paul Gaultier, its truly a second skin with nipples and toes, fingers all finely tinted to ressemble flesh. Magnificent dress/body suit. Here the actress wears a simplified version with zippers under the breast, around arm holes, why? because her skin is supposed to be burning and sensitive. OK.
Then the crazy doctor sleeps with his transexual pet - he showed us the sex change requires the vagina needs to be stretched incrementally with various size strechers in shapes of slim, medium, large, full size pencil/penis shaped sticks. A little peek into the process of what sex change requires to go from a man to a woman.
The mother of the doctor is played by the usual actress v gd.
However this movie lacks heat, its a string of complicated family stories linked to make up the intriques with sex change contents. It lacks enthusiasm.

Everybody dies in the end and the most intersting and challenging moment of the story comes - how does the "daughter/son" deal with meeting his/her birth mother, and how does he feel really? All these could have had moments of emotional intensity - with some inner truth to be said to the audience through the sex changed character - but the scene blacks out to credits. ?!! Quick and easy.

There are lots of sex, erotic, transgression themed movies out in recent months, and quite a few has the glossy, esoteric voyeuristic elements in it - not yet seen any one that truly deals with the decision making, the turmoil of the people involved. We are curious but no longer only curious, we also want to understand too.

Maybe Almodovar himself is tired of all this.