As the camera catches a man and his lover in a moment of ecstasy, he blurts out without inhibition, “This is the happiest moment of my life.” A furtive, transgressive affair and its scorching complications are at the center of “Second Skin,” an intriguing Spanish feature by Gerard Vera.
The film’s faithless husband, Alberto (Jordi Molla), is an aeronautics engineer who detests his neatly arranged bourgeois life. The affair is his way of rejecting the orderly existence that increasingly suffocates him.
Alberto’s life is also a studiously elaborate mask that conceals his sexual inclinations. His affair is with another man, the dark and brooding Diego (Javier Bardem), a doctor at a private clinic.
The raw, unvarnished sexual contact between the men is unnerving, though Vera’s film is more concerned with the emotional consequences of their liaison, as layers of buried resentments, personal concessions and quietly desperate resignation are revealed. From the elegantly stylized title sequence, the mood of this small and smart film is one of disruption and breakdown.
Alberto’s wife, Elena (Ariadna Gil), unsatisfied, increasingly distraught, has detected the signals that her husband is having an affair. She tries desperately to ignite their dormant sexual life (when she presents him with a sexually suggestive book, he turns away in disgust). In direct counterpoint, the attraction between the men is animalistic and kinetic.
The film is handsomely shot (by cinematographer Julio Maduga), and Vera, whose background is in production design, beautifully uses space in contracting and shifting the physical relationships of his three primary characters. The camera dances and pirouettes around their bodies, drawing out their naked vulnerability and raging insecurities.
The gay sex in “Second Skin” is vividly displayed and erotically charged, while the heterosexual material is presented discreetly — which is meant to suggest that the body and mind are tantalizingly discordant, even at odds with each other. Extremely well acted by the four primary actors, this is a seriously intended movie that is not easily forgotten.
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“Second Skin” ((star)(star)(star)) opens Friday at the Century Centre Cinema. Running time: 1:40. MPAA rating: R (violence, sexuality and language). Spanish, subtitled.
