Any report on the events of the 19th at the Festival de Cannes is overshadowed by the latest news that director Lars von Trier, director of Melancholia, had been expelled, labelled as persona non grata, after pro-Nazi comments. Von Trier has since apologized, but he is out of the running. Without that event, this report would have solely been about the new Pedro Almodóvar ?lm, La piel que habito (The Skin I Live in), starring Antonio Banderas. It’s a much darker ?ick than Banderas’s other Cannes outing, the animated Puss in Boots.
La piel que habito has lifted the competition at Cannes, with Almodóvar taking an unusual turn of creating a thriller–horror ?lm, based on the novel Mygale (Tarantula in the UK), by Thierry Jonquet. Reviewers likened La piel que habito to a modern-day Frankenstein, though the original novel was considerably more complex than that.
Almodóvar has managed to preserve many of the nuances of the original, and some critics consider Banderas’s performance his best. Celebrities attending the première included director Almodóvar, Banderas, couturier Jean Paul Gaultier, Rossi de Palma, Zoé Félix, Carlos Bardem, Marisa Paredes, Blanca Suarez, Jan Cornet, Elena Anaya, Spanish and former First Lady Anne-Aymone Giscard d’Estaing.