The ancient Greeks would have loved this story.
A man highly skilled in the arts and sciences of his day uses his expertise to try to save his wife’s life and restore her beauty, horribly disfigured by an automobile accident fire, and then to try again when fate gives him a chance to right another wrong.
After saving his wife Gal’s life, Dr. Robert Ledgard (Antonio Banderas), a world-renowned plastic surgeon, devoted his expertise to fully restoring her disfigured body to her pre-crash condition in a state-of-the-art surgical theater and medical research laboratory in his home.
Ledgard keeps Gal literally in the dark for months while his treatments almost miraculously restore her to human form, though not yet to her original beauty. At last able to stand, one afternoon Gal goes to a window and draws aside heavy curtains when she hears her daughter Norma (Ana Mena) outside singing a song that she taught her. But Gal is horrified when she sees her ravaged image for the first time, reflected in the window glass; she throws herself from the window into the courtyard below.
Norma becomes psychologically deranged when her disfigured mother suddenly falls to her death next to where she is playing outside. She requires years of psychiatric care.
Ledgard subsequently takes the unstable and heavily medicated teenage Norma (Blanca Suárez) to a wedding reception where she is raped, and thus further psychologically damaged.
The doctor identifies the rapist, Vicente Guillén Piñeiro (Jan Cornet); he makes him disappear and keeps him as a prisoner.
Because her father found her unconscious on the ground where she was raped, the awakening Norma evidently confuses Ledgard with the rapist. Mentally unhinged, she later takes her own life by throwing herself from a window, like her mother.
Ledgard exacts his revenge by using his art to perform a sex change operation (vaginoplasty) on Vicente. The predator becomes the prey.
But he does not stop there. Ledgard continues to experiment to give his creation, with whom he has fallen in love and given the name Vera (Elena Anaya), a perfect body and ‘the best skin in the world’—actually a transgenetic pig-human hybrid much stronger and more beautiful than human skin, which he calls ‘Gal’ after his former wife (and likely an allusion to Pygmalion’s Galatea, his ivory carving given life by Aphrodite).
An existential Pygmalion, Ledgard uses his skill to fashion a dream from his worst nightmare. His craftsmanship exceeds the material, but this does not make the dream any more real, nor diminish the nightmare.
Curiously enough, Gal’s accident and the story’s resolution both are triggered by Ledgard’s half-brother, Zeca (Roberto Álamo), a base id-man whom we see dressed as a tiger.
Despite the judgments of our courts of law, social mores and modern psychiatry, one of the things that make this story interesting is that Ledgard is not ‘obsessional’ or ‘perverse’, rather preconscious like a figure in classical myth.
This is a fact: not a legal defense, sociological excuse or psychological rationale. As a figure in myth or a dream, Ledgard methodically follows a rational process, albeit to what society, any medical board or court of law should deem a criminally insane end.
But Ledgard is not a god. His hubris lies in what moderns would call his ‘delusion’ of imagining that Vera, the beautiful thing of his creation, is equally beautiful in mind to Vicente, the ‘material’ from which he rendered her. As in Greek myth, the gods restore the mean.
This synopsis takes several kinks out of the main plot twists, but there is plenty more to see and look for in this rich and involved family tale which has all the verve, color and drama of Greek tragedy.
The story, which Almodóvar adapted from Thierry Jonquet’s 1995 novel Mygale (2003 English translation Tarantula), fits the stuff of myth neatly into contemporary tailoring. José Luis Alcaine’s cinematography of the actors, especially the women, is exquisite, as are Antxon Gómez’s sets.
Almodóvar’s signature lollipop colors glisten in the sets like spring flowers in the rain—or Toledo artist Jorge Galindo’s flower paintings. A full sized pair of Titians—the Venus of Urbino and Venus with and Organist and Cupid on the landing outside Vera’s door contrast with her live image in a flesh colored body suit on a rich red duvet via closed circuit camera on a huge plasma screen television in Ledgard’s room.
Almodóvar also uses images and alludes to the work of American sculptress Louise Bourgeois. He thanks her in his credits as someone ‘whose work not only moves me, but was the salvation of the character Vera.’
The original music, composed and conducted by Alberto Iglesias in an elegiac romantic style for a six-piece chamber ensemble, intimates a haunting fusion of Bernard Herrmann and Johannes Brahms.
The two versions of the wedding party scene are introduced by Inoidel on tenor saxophone deeply purring Sidney Bechet’s Petite Fleur like Lester Young; the Afro-Spanish singer Concha Buika fronts the jazz band at the wedding party.
Altogether, this film is the work of an accomplished master, a gripping story beautifully refined in every detail.
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