An overbearing mother prepares her son for life in her absence, and makes him promise to keep wearing the mask. This short is a precursor to the new Eduardo Casanova feature La Pietà.
Tag Archives: Eloi Costa
290. SKINS (2017)
Pieles
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“I do not attribute to nature either beauty or deformity, order or confusion. Only in relation to our imagination can things be called beautiful or ugly, well-ordered or confused.”–Baruch Spinoza
DIRECTED BY: Eduardo Casanova
FEATURING: Ana Polvorosa, Candela Peña, Macarena Gómez, Carmen Machi, Jon Kortajarena, Secun de la Rosa, Itziar Castro, Antonio Durán ‘Morris’, Ana María Ayala, Eloi Costa
PLOT: Unable to control his impulses, a tormented pedophile visits a madam who specializes in “unusual” tastes. From the catalog she offers, he selects a girl born with no eyes, and brings her a gift of two jewels. The lives of these two, along with other internally and externally deformed people including a woman with an anus for a mouth and a boy who wishes he was a mermaid, intersect in surprising ways seventeen years later.
BACKGROUND:
- Eduardo Casanova was a child star on Spanish television. Starting in 2009, he used the money and connections he made acting to make a series of short films. Many of the eventual cast members of Skins appear in these shorts. One, 2015’s “Eat My Shit,” features Ana Polvorosa in an incident that later made it into Skins (although the tone of the short is more juvenile and jokey than the feature film).
- Underground director Alex de la Iglesia and actress Carolina Bang (who starred in one of Casanova’s earlier shorts and appears in a small role as a psychiatrist here) served as producers.
INDELIBLE IMAGE: This pink and purple freak fantasia provides many possibilities, both disturbing and beautiful. The obvious choice would be Samantha, the girl with the inverted digestive system. If at all possible, it’s best that her appearance be left as a surprise, although that may be hard to do given her prominence in the trailer and the fact that she’s the character everyone describes when describing the movie to their friends. We’ll go in a different, but equally memorable, direction by selecting Cristian’s mermaid-boy fantasy, which features the lavender-headed outcast seated on a rock crusted by pink seashells in a purple-walled heaven while fish rain around him.
THREE WEIRD THINGS: Pink merkin; the prettiest eyes in the world; freak fetish
WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: From the opening scene of a reluctant pedophile crying as he makes his selection in a highly specialized brothel, decorated all in pink and run by an elderly madame who works in the nude, Skins‘s crazy credentials are never in doubt. Perhaps the most shocking things aren’t the deformities and perversions but the compassion and intricate plotting, which suggest depths beyond Skins‘ freak show surface.
Promotional video for Skins (Imagine Film Festival Screening)
COMMENTS: A weird, glittering pink gem lies hidden deep in the Continue reading 290. SKINS (2017)