Wo r d s b y A da m W o o d wa r d
hat man creates with one hand, he destroys with the other. This hard-wired human paradox forms the crux of Pedro Almodóvar’s simmering tale of betrayal, revenge and Promethean obsession. But before passions flare and the plot accelerates headlong into madness, Almodóvar establishes order. We open in Toledo (the rustic capital of the Castile-La Mancha region synonymous with so much of the Spaniard’s work) with a postcard shot of the old city that echoes a frame from Luis Buñuel’s 1970 film Tristana. The overlying caption tells us it’s 2012, an early disclaimer that points to a pseudo-science-fiction subplot. ‘Once Upon a Time…’, it could read. In a nearby lecture theatre, Dr Robert Ledgard (Antonio Banderas) is presenting his latest breakthrough to the science community. Through the use of transgenesis, a highly controversial interspecies cell-splicing process, this modern-day Dr Moreau has invented a revolutionary new tissue. But this dabbling in the dark arts horrifies his peers. The bones of the character are lifted from Thierry Jonquet’s 2003 novel Tarantula, but the rest is all Almodóvar. Like many tortured cinematic villains, Robert’s moral judgment was clouded in a previous life by a series of traumatic ordeals. In this ‘horror story without screams or frights’ (as Almodóvar has described it) he is an appropriately silent antagonist, honing his laser focus during endless nights developing a hybrid skin in his basement laboratory. All the while, his timid guinea pig, Vera (Elena Anaya), paces tirelessly in her first-floor prison, flexing her flesh-toned bodysuit with yoga practice and skimming second-hand literature. The grandeur of Robert’s palatial abode contrasts the sanitised nakedness of Vera’s chambers, where the walls have been defaced in typical penal fashion with eyeliner tallies and existential graffiti: ‘I breathe. I know I breathe’, reads one tag. Almodóvar, inspired by Fritz Lang and Alfred Hitchcock’s surviving silent noirs, originally intended for the film to be shot in black-and-white. For someone renowned for his aesthetic flamboyance it’s hard to imagine what that monochromatic homage might have looked like. But a trace of it survives in Robert’s kitchen, where his live-in helper Marilia (Marisa Paredes) observes Vera on a colourless closed-circuit monitor. Marilia is at first an idle voyeur. Her duties are domestic, and she carries them out with unflinching obedience until an
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