Almodovar's obsessions

Pedro Almodovar has written and directed some great movies but his latest, "The Skin I Live In" is not one of them. Like many Almodovar works, it's complex, kinky, edgy, pushing the boundaries of the probable, interested in gender and power, garishly colorful, brightly contemporary. Unlike his good and great films, it is so weird and extreme in its premises as to be impossible to buy into other than as some kind of allegory or parable. And even then, its characters are so unlikable and their behavior so depraved and reprehensible that we have no way to approach this movie - there's no one we believe in or care about and by the end, before the end, actually, I just couldn't take any more and had to bail out. Almodovar in recent films has become increasingly interested in powerful women and in the power of women working in consort - that's great - but also, more disturbingly, in this sense that men, heterosexual men anyway, are brutal and cruel, and this movie is a paradigm of that. The main character, a plastic surgeon (Antonio Banderas) invents an artificial skin that will help burn victims. Sounds good - but in order to create this skin he holds a woman subject captive for many years, the subject of his ghoulish experiments. This is beyond the pale on so many levels - medically, morally, criminally. Over the course of the movie we learn that (spoilers here) this "woman" is a young man who raped the doc's daughter; in vengeance the doc captured and tortured him and then transgendered him - and now he and the doc have fallen in love. In other words, the doctor is extremely sick and disturbed - but Almodovar doesn't play it as such. The doc is actually a tender lover, compared with every other male we come across in this film - sex between man and woman is brutal rape and exploitation, in the world of this movie. Worse, women, so powerful in other Almodovar films, are suicidal and psychologically frail, dependent on men to rescue them - and then what? Sometimes artists reach a point in their careers where they push their themes to such an extreme that they become parodies of themselves: great art is about the interaction of an artist's vision with the world in which we live, not about exalting the artist's vision above the world of nature, of human relationships, of the interior life of the characters. This is recognizably an Almodovar film, but nothing in the film is recognizable as the world in which we live. He's a great enough director that he can produce whatever films he wants, but he's become ensnared in his own obsessions.