Antonio Banderas comes home

Three decades ago, an impoverished young actor named Antonio Banderas, who turns 51 Wednesday, was sitting with friends outside Madrid's National theatre when a curious figure happened by. The new arrival sported a backcombed goth bouffant and brandished a bright red briefcase that could only contain documents of national importance. He ordered a drink, cracked some jokes then turned abruptly towards Banderas. "You have a very romantic face," he said. "You should do movies. Bye-bye!" And with that he was off, swinging his briefcase through the crowds on the Calle del Principe. Nonplussed, Banderas turned to his friends. "Oh, that's Pedro Almodovar," they told him. "He made a movie once. But he won't make any more." Banderas and Almodovar went on to make five films together. These were wild, bawdy and exuberant; joyous yelps from the underground that caught the ears of the world. They installed the director as the most feted Spanish filmmaker of his generation, and they also provided a springboard for the actor, who abandoned the old gang, lit out for America and remade himself as a Hollywood star. And this was all thanks to Almodovar, Banderas says, and all down to that chance encounter. His latest film reunites him with Almodovar for the first time since 1990's Tie Me Up, Tie Me Down and turns out to be the best thing he's done in years. The Skin I Live In is a giddying, psycho-sexual Frankenstein tale, loosely based on a French novel (Tarantula) by Thierry Jonquet and layered with false trails and flashbacks. Prolonged tease Banderas plays mad scientist Robert Ledgard, a driven plastic surgeon, shunned by the establishment and plotting revenge against the young buck who assaulted his daughter. The film's first half plays out as a prolonged, perfectly managed tease. Ledgard is a widower, except that maybe he's not. His daughter was raped, except that maybe she wasn't. The audience is led by the nose, groping blind. Then, out of nowhere, the trap is sprung; the plot spun on its head. In one fell swoop, Almodovar's thriller throws off its clothes, shucks off its skin and dances around in its bones. Banderas initially struggled to acclimatise to the film. The picture darts across so many registers that he found himself running to catch up. "Sometimes, swear to God, I thought I was playing Shakespeare," he says. "And sometimes this cheap Mexican soap opera." Ledgard, too, proved a tough nut to crack. Banderas plays him as stealthy, steely and all-but impassive — but this was not his first approach. "Rehearsing the film in Pedro's house, I figured, ‘This guy is bigger than life, so I'm going to go big. Square my shoulders. Show off all my acting skills.' And Pedro said, "No, we're not going that way, my friend. The story's told in the script, you don't need to push it. Hold your horses. Keep it minimalist.'" Banderas shrugs. "Well, he was right and I was wrong. Yet again, he gave me a lesson." On heading home to work with Almodovar, Banderas confesses that he was nervous. There was so much water under the bridge. Of course the two men had kept in touch down the years, but people change and life moves on, and who could say whether they'd still click in the way they used to? In the event, he says, he needn't have worried. "All the way through filming, Pedro kept turning to me and saying, ‘You know what? You didn't change a bit!' It's like those 22 years didn't happen." Banderas grins. "It was almost like he was annoyed with me." And what of Almodovar? The ungainly telephone assistant with the bright red briefcase has covered some ground himself. Following Banderas' defection, the director spent a brief period in the doldrums before rebounding with mature, luscious later-period work like All About My Mother, Volver and the Oscar-winning Talk To Her. Today, his reputation is arguably more burnished than ever. Banderas mulls it over. "In terms of the films, Pedro got more formal, more minimalist. He got rid of all the baroque issues he had before. As a person, he's pretty much the same." He shakes his head. "Maybe he's more profound, more serious, more interested in transcendental things. I said to him several times when we were shooting, ‘Hey, Pedro, we have to do a comedy! It's good for you, come on. Let's laugh like we did in the old days. Let's dance and be silly, before we both get too old.'" This time, I think, the mentor can learn from the muse.