Other thing is, there’s talk of rape in this, too.

Now, I went to see The Skin I Live In (La Piel Que Habito) on my own, which was possibly a mistake, the reason for which you’ll realise as you read on.  I have a little snippet of anxiety left over from school whereby if I go to do something alone, I’ll be afraid I’m in the wrong place.  I’ll get my ticket, read the ticket, go to the place it says on the ticket, but I’ll still be a bit scared that I’m somehow, magically, in the wrong place.

So there I sat in the Arts Picturehouse in Cambridge, nervously clutching my mug of tea (THEY LET YOU BRING FUCKING TEA INTO THE FUCKING CINEMA OH MY GOD HEAVEN IN AN AUDITORIUM!!!!), wondering if, when the film started, it’d be the right one or not.

Ten minutes of sumptuous interiors, high-angled shots, hyper-saturated film and an onslaught of seething, brooding madness in, I realised with great satisfaction that yep, I’m watching a goddamned Pedro Almodóvar film.  That man has his favourite toys, tropes and themes, doesn’t he?  This is another film that watches class through a fish-eye lens, focussing on the life of a very well-off, in-demand surgeon (Antonio Banderas), who is currently undertaking research into the growth of synthetic human skin for the treatment of burns sufferers.  He has “help” and a housekeeper and everything.

Also, he keeps a young woman (Elena Anaya) as a pet in a locked room and does experiments on her.

This is just the set-up.  This is all revealed in the first extravagant slice of immaculately tailored, dressed and designed film.  It goes further. Every single character in this film is broken in some fundamental way.  Or if they don’t start out that way, they become that way.

The only truly sympathetic character, I found, was that of the housekeeper, Marilia (Marisa Paredes).  She’s stalwart and practical, caring and protective, and I wish she survived ’til the end, but she doesn’t.  I was surprised, actually, that there were any purely sympathetic characters at all in this film – it’s Almodóvar, no-one is innocent ever!  And, indeed, she is the only fully likeable, empathic person in the film.  Everyone else is absolutely horrible in some ways, and deeply sympathetic in others, leaving you with absolutely no bloody idea what to make of them overall.

So far, so Almodóvar.

Now, while I was watching this, absorbing it like a sponge, my thoughts drifted – as they are wont to do – to the rest of the Almodóvar canon.  My favourite film of his by a long shot is Bad Education, and if you’ve not watched it, you really must – but he really does have this ongoing obsession (theme, exploration, whatever you want to call it) with transgender people, and the process of transforming gender presentation, and whether or not transformation redeems.  He’s also good at casting real trans* people as transgender characters, which is something that Hollywood has yet to realise is a thing that they should fucking do, too.  “Huh,” I thought, with this in mind, watching Antonio Banderas’s distressingly hot surgeon-gone-mad leaking deep-eyed insanity all over the cinema, “There’s no trans* folk in this!  Weird, for Almodóvar, to not at least have one of us.”

And then everyone was trans* and everything hurt.

No, I’m serious.  Holy shit.  Yes!  Indeed, ALL film literature on this is meticulously devoid of spoilers (and I’m ruining that now, hahar!) but the pretty young thing Scary Dr. Richard is keeping as a toy/pet/experiment/wife replacement/wall-to-wall security camera work of art (I’m not even joking) is the bloke that raped his daughter and has been surgically rebuilt to look like a cis woman as punishment.

Now, before I explore that comprehensive cinematographic clusterfuck in more detail, I’m going to make a quick aside here and say that this film also deals with consent and choice, and what happens to our minds when these basic human rights are removed from us.  There’s a lot of relatively graphic sex in it, and not all of it is 100% doubtlessly consensual, so please bear that in mind if you’re off to watch it.  There’s also non-consensual body modification and surgery, none of which is graphic, but the treatment of it is brutal and plays upon the mind’s ability to patch in worse realities than that to which it’s denied visual access.  And there’s also kidnapping, gagging, drugging, imprisonment and so on, all of which is beautifully and luxuriantly filmed for your horrified pleasure.  Nothing is sacred, no-one is innocent, and everything is broken.  It’s amazing.  It’s like, as the film goes on, it peels off layers of scabs to reveal more horrible things underneath.

Back to the sex reassignment thing, then.  This is the first time I have ever seen in a film the notion of sex reassignment as punishment.  I’ve seen castration as punishment (The Ladies Club), I’ve seen rape as punishment for being transgender (Boys Don’t Cry) but I’ve not seen this.  Now, my initial reaction was, “ASDLAKSJFLDKG HOW DARE MR. ALMODOVAR USE THE REALITY OF SEX REASSIGNMENT LIKE IT’S SOME KIND OF DREADFUL, FEARFUL THING THAT ANYONE WOULD HATE TO HAVE HAPPEN TO THEM” and then I realised that he’s actually written a pretty good precis of what it’s like to be a trans man.

Vicente, the rapist of Richard’s daughter, and let’s ignore the rape part for the moment, is taken away and forcibly reassigned “female”.  He’s given a vulva, new skin and breasts, and from the looks of it, a new bone structure and voice, too.  (And there’s also the bit where Antonio Banderas chains him up and shaves him with a straight razor, which gave me that’s-my-kink related problems…)

But he still identifies as Vicente – despite quite literally wearing Richard’s dead wife’s face (the reason, I presume, that the part of Vera is not played by a trans woman) – is tortured by how he now has all these different dressy, make-up-y and vaginal intercourse-y expectations of him, and finds solace in yoga and opium to help him forget the pain.

Dude, that’s me.  Except without the yoga and the opium and… a few other things, too, but the main theme is there.  This is the non-consensual assignment of a sex and attributed gender role that you just aren’t.  He plays along and acts the part, but only as long as he absolutely has to before he can escape.

So that was the first time I ever sympathised with a rapist in a film, the end.

Seriously. Watch his films and tell me if I'm wrong. I'm not.

Apparently, people walked out of the preview screening here in Cambridge, which surprises me.  There’s nothing graphic (other than sex) in this film, and really, then, you’re only left with the themes to run with, and I can’t really see how you could be disgusted to the point of walk-out over the themes in this film.  The cynical feminist in me wonders if the very idea of sex reassignment is really that disgusting to some people…

You should see this film because:
– It’s Almodóvar’s most comprehensible and accessible film that I’ve seen, and would make a nice introduction to how brilliant his work is
– It’s absolutely brutal, terrifying and bizarre, and those are all qualities that make good cinema
– It’s beautifully made, perfectly cast, and the soundtrack made me cry
– You won’t see another film like it, ever

You should not see this film because:
– HOLY NON-CON TRIGGERS, BATMAN
– Antonio Banderas is problematically hot and it’s difficult to watch him being such a terrifying pile of mess and insanity without fancying him a lot
– OR AT LEAST I THOUGHT SO, BUT THEN, I DO HAVE THE WORST TASTE IN MEN EVER

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Fausta and her mother in The Milk of Sorrow

There are times when I’m glad I live in such a blinkered cultural bubble, with only a dim grasp of global politics. Case in point: while I was enraptured by Mysterious Cities of Gold in the 1980s, the real-life land of the Incas – Peru – was being torn apart by a bloody internal conflict between communist guerrilla army the Shining Path and government security forces.

I was only five, of course. But when I watched it again at university (a rite of passage, surely?) only a year after the conflict had wound down, I was none the wiser. In fact, in some senses it hasn’t really ended. The latest reported attack by Shining Path rebels was in April 2010.

Between 1980 and 2000 some 70,000 people died, including huge numbers of civilians. Countless survivors are still in search of justice, including the thousands of women who were victims of sexual violence and humiliation at the hands of soldiers.

Despite this, and the creation of a Truth and Reconciliation Commission, there is a reluctance in many places to discuss the events of the war and what happened, and many women, especially poor and indigenous women in the Andean areas that were worst effected, struggle to voice the suffering they have endured, to access support and see justice being done.

The Milk of Sorrow

It is this situation that is addressed in Peruvian director Claudia Llosa’s 2009 film, The Milk of Sorrow. The film is based on the book Entre Prójimos by Kimberly Theidon, which collected testimonies from women who had experienced sexual violence, including brutal gang rape (here’s an interview with Theidon). Many of the women Theidon spoke to reported a belief that the trauma they had experienced had somehow been transmitted to their children through their breastmilk. Llosa claims in this Birds Eye View interview that this is a genuine belief (hm…) but either way it is certainly a good expression of the severe psychological damage and lingering emotional distress caused by conflict to individuals and entire communities.

The film follows Fausta, a young woman whose mother was raped during the war, and who believes she has been fed on the milk of sorrow. Another character says that children like her have no souls; they have fled for fear. Fausta is so afraid of her mother’s fate she inserts a potato into her vagina as a guard against rape. Here’s the trailer for the film.

Llosa’s first film is also set in Peru, also deals with sexual violence, and stars the same actress, Magaly Solier. Madeinusa (2006) is on the one hand a bit of a fairytale, about an invented religious custom in a fictional Andean village. But on the other hand it deals with poverty, rape, incest, murder and child abuse. In the village in which 14 year old Madeinusa lives, between Good Friday and Easter Sunday Christ is dead, so there is no sin. Or rather, your sins don’t count. Beautiful scenery, gut-wrenching scenes. It’s bleak – there’s no wholly sympathetic character in the whole film, and even the everyman ‘good guy’ is happy to take advantage of Madeinusa’s teenage interest in him. She emerges triumphant, after a fashion. Here’s the trailer (in Spanish).

Explaining or exploiting?

While I think both Madeinusa and The Milk of Sorrow are stunning bits of cinema, they do make me uncomfortable, as both films and their director have been accused of racism in their portrayal of the indigenous population of Peru as superstitious, vicious and backward. Llosa belongs to the Peruvian white urban elite, and in fact now lives in Spain. The charge levelled at her is that she has used the stories and experiences of Andean women to turn a profit but without showing respect for indigenous communities or involving native people in the project in more than a superficial way. Carlos in DC sees this as emblematic of the inequality in Peruvian society:

I have witnessed the racial and cultural discrimination that our Indigenous peoples face in Peru, especially in the city of Lima where we are discriminated by our accents, ways of living and traditions. At the same time, Lima profits from our cultures and resources.

To me, The Milk of Sorrow symbolizes that racial and economical division exactly. A filmmaker from Lima and her producers from Europe are using the sad experiences and the suffering of our Andean women as a topic for their profitable film.

It’s that old chestnut again: by representing and discussing sexual violence and using real testimonies to inform your representation, are you reinforcing a message of victimhood and exploiting the women whose experiences you use? Worse still, are you at risk of producing something titillating? It’s a tough one even without the dimension of race, which clearly can’t be ignored in the Latin American context (or, well, anywhere really).

The Milk of Sorrow, more than Madeinusa, has served to raise awareness of sexual violence in conflict, and Magaly Solier has also supported an anti-violence against women campaign, so perhaps there’s the social good silver lining.

Lots of impatient IMDb reviews urge people just to enjoy the films as art and stop worrying about the politics. I think that is exactly the wrong approach. Whatever else Claudia Llosa’s films are, they are an opportunity to talk about things which don’t often get an airing; painful, complex things which need to be voiced.

Feminism in Peru

I’m trying to pay attention to things that are happening in the world wider than London, and especially learning about and learning from the women’s movement in other countries.

Happily, I got to meet women from two leading feminist organisations in Peru – DEMUS and Fepromu – at a Womankind Worldwide event in April, where they spoke about their work. You can watch subtitled films of their talks here and here if you’d like to know more about what it’s like working for women’s rights in Latin America.

There’s also this interesting article about the relationship between development, Western feminism and the grassroots women’s movement in Peru, centred around the network of comedores.