'The Skin I Live In' more than skin deep

The debonair madman played by Antonio Banderas in Pedro Almodóvar's "The Skin I Live In" is seductively reassuring, and totally bonkers -- much like the movie itself.

In its characteristically Almodóvarian excess, it combines lush melodrama, colors that might have popped off the palette of Douglas Sirk and an incongruous serenity that masks a dark lunacy at its story's heart. Robert Ledgard (Banderas), an affluent, influential and gifted plastic surgeon and dermatologic visionary, is presenting the scientific community with news of his latest discovery, a synthetic skin that resists everything from burns to bug bites. He claims to have tested it on mice; his colleagues suspect he's been experimenting on humans.

As facades peel away, the revelations come fast and with appalling regularity. But what can be told without ruining anything is that Robert has two women back at his fabulous house, both of dubious origin. Marilia (Marisa Paredes), who knows more than any house servant needs to know; and Vera (Elena Anaya), who is Robert's prisoner, as well as his stunningly beautiful lab rat. She's an undead ringer for Robert's late wife -- something of which Marilia doesn't approve. How Vera got that way goes to the depths of Robert's despair, guilt and demons.

But "The Skin I Live In" is hardly cheap horror. Almodóvar, perhaps inspired by the first face transplant (performed in his native Spain in 2010), takes plastic surgery to its metaphorical extreme, and explores the nature of identity and perception -- what we don't see is as important here as what we do. Though Almodóvar, as always, is obsessed with the beautiful, the voluptuousness with which he has composed "The Skin I Live In" is actually a mask for the heartbreaking longing of his movie, a kind of Joan Rivers-meets-Frankenstein story in which there can be no winners, except for us viewers.

PLOT Guilt-ridden over his dead wife, a plastic surgeoncreates a kind of skin, which he uses to rebuild the woman he has imprisoned in his house. RATING R (disturbing images)

CAST Antonio Banderas, Elena Anaya, Marisa Paredes

LENGTH 1:57

PLAYING AT Malverne Cinema 4, Manhasset Cinemas, East Hampton 6, Raceway 10, Westbury; Cinema Arts Centre, Huntington

BOTTOM LINE Outrageous, voluptuous,

perversely intoxicating. In Spanish, English subtitles.