Review of The Skin I Live In (2011) by Shiira — 22 Dec 2011

Alicia menstruated. She needs to be cleaned up, down there. First, soapy water gets wringed from a rag, and then, it's a quick spritz from the water bottle, which sanitizes the vaginal expanse from the discharge of period blood with an antiseptic wiping, courtesy of two health care professionals.

The female nurse uses gloves; the male nurse, we notice, uses his bare hands on the comatose patient. Although her flesh is often exposed, a woman's erogenous zones, in the context of the hospital, goes through a de-eroticization process, due to the specter of death, but nevertheless, the former dancer, we can plainly see, was a real heartbreaker, so her sexual allure is merely frozen, not lost.

Supposedly, Alicia's breasts have turned quotidian, just another part that comprises the female anatomy, breasts stilled by her soporific state, no longer having to endure the crux of objectification, so nobody minds that Benigno(presumed gay) touches Alicia without a latex buffer.

Needless to say, in the aftermath of the nurse's fireable offense, the rapist pulled a Jack Tripper on the whole hospital staff. When Benigno touches the vegetative body, it's with latent sexual desire; it's not rote clinical labor, because the benign psychopath impregnates his unconscious charge.

But since Alicia's miscarriage results in her awakening, the rapist becomes a hero(in the filmmaker's eyes), and therefore pardoned of his crime. Obscured by the filmmaker's obvious affection for Benigno, is the fact that "Talk to Her", and not just "The Skin I Live In", is actually a horror movie, too, in the human sense, akin to "Straw Dogs".

The controversial Sam Peckinpah film presents rape as a collaboration between a sexy woman and a helpless man. Amy Sumner, a mathematician's wife, walks confidently down a busy Cornwall street, braless, with her hard nipples poking through a white blouse, in full view of the menfolk.

She's responsible for her own rape, the filmmaker is saying, due to her provocative attire. Worse yet, in "Talk to Her", Alicia has no say in what she wears(a flimsy off-white hospital gown), but gets raped anyway by the male nurse, since men are powerless to the female form, therefore, can't be held accountable for their actions.

In the film-within-the-film, a black-and-white one-reeler, a man shrinks to the size of a figurine after downing some potion concocted by his lover, a scientist. Sharing a bed, the man pulls off the covers, revealing the woman's nude body, a landscape, and while she's sound asleep, he walks into her vagina.

The orifice recalls the portal in Spike Jonze's "Being John Malkovich", especially near the end where puppeteer Craig Schwartz(John Cusack) ends up, not in the famous actor, but in the consciousness of a small girl, where he is doomed to live life through her eyes, without the benefit of puppet strings to exhort his will on the body and mind.

Similarly, the nurse is a puppeteer himself in that Alicia can't move without his prompting. Visibly affected by the film, Benigno says, "And Alfredo stays in her forever," in a melancholic voice, because he knows that his time with the beautiful dancer is strictly circumstantial.

Like Craig, the nurse imagines himself living vicariously through somebody else, but instead of taking up occupation in the person's brain, his projected counterpart lives in a vagina, doomed to witness man after man sexually pleasing the woman he loves.

"Being John Malkovich" could easily have been directed by this filmmaker, since the 1999 "head movie" deals with sexual identity(and rape) in the same audacious manner, informing not only the sexual mores surrounding "Talk to Her", but "The Skin I Live In", as well.

If you lined up the seemingly asexual Benigno alongside the masculine-looking Dr. Robert Ledgard, most people would peg the former as being gay. The manner in which Robert stares at the closed-circuit television feed of his prisoner would seem to confirm his heterosexuality.

The mad doctor, however, is a freak; he's the inverse of Maxine, who says, "Behind the too-prominent brow and male pattern baldness, I sensed your feminine longing," to Lotte, lurking behind the famous actor's facade, as they f*ck.

Maxine loves her, "but only when [she's] in Malkovich," whereas Robert doesn't yearn for his dead wife, but instead, the man who raped his daughter. When the geneticist forces himself on Vera(who is the spitting image of Gal), he express his latent homosexuality without giving anything away, since Vincente, is, from head to toe, all woman, save for the brain, the same place, by the way, where Craig ends up.

At least Vincente gets to be his own puppet master, albeit it's a small consolation for "Being Gal Cruz". In the end, Maxine realizes that she can love Lotte without Malkovich serving as a conduit for her heart, whereas Dr.

Ledgard dies before coming to terms with his unresolved feelings for dudes.