Almódovar’s Survivors

The autobiographies of New Zealand’s “greatest” author Janet Frame were part of an “esoteric selection of references” given to Spanish director Pedro Almodóvar’s new leading lady Elena Anaya in preparation for her role as Vera in the new film, The Skin I Live In. The message, it seems, is that Almodóvar saw Vera as a survivor. In the film, Vera spends her life locked up in a sealed room in a plastic surgeon’s idyllic Toledo mansion, a deluxe prison. The surgeon, played by Antonio Banderas, is using Vera as a human guinea pig to test a heat and disease resistant transgenic skin that is still sensitive to the human touch.