Eduardo Casanova
Pieles

The skins we inhabit are the garments we carry with us day by day and that shape our entire existence. It is said that clothes don't make the man, and if that is already hard to accept, it's even more challenging to judge a person beyond their physical appearance, especially in extreme cases, of individuals forced to live in deformed or handicapped bodies.

''Pieles'', the debut feature film by Spanish director Eduardo Casanova, presents a series of 'monstrous' characters to the general public: men, women, and adolescents who live in a body different from the normal. Their stories are woven into the human fabric of equally bizarre, often inadequate characters who surround and live with them. A fat, naked woman shows a man a catalog of children and then suggests a special one to him, an eyeless teenager, who would be the best choice because some of us are born to suffer, and this is their destiny: the opening dialogue captures at once a cruel and ruthless truth as well as the incorrigible human limitation of not being able to accept what is different, and from this comes the inadequacy of the supporting characters in engaging with them.

Casanova, already a director of short films, had directed the brilliant ''Eat My Shit'', a prequel to Pieles. A short film of about three minutes whose protagonist is Samantha, a girl with a butt-face (she has her anus instead of her oral cavity, and vice versa) who posts a selfie on Instagram, which is removed because it ''does not meet community standards'', and decides to get revenge with a little prank... Samantha is one of the protagonists of Pieles, whose story will be resumed.

Like the short that preceded it, the film does not have moralistic intentions: it does not showcase marginalization or segregation as a social complaint, but as facts, which further highlight the extreme dignity of these people, who live their lives in society despite most of the time being forced into marginal positions. The representation of diversity is sharp, bitter, hilarious, grotesque.

The struggle for the recognition of one's human dignity despite an appearance that is on the edge of humanity was the central theme of the famous The Elephant Man: Lynch here placed at the center of the story the marginalization and the desire for self-affirmation of a man—fully a man, but monstrous and deformed, used as a sideshow freak. The cry of the elephant man in front of a crowd ready to destroy him, the word as a sign of humanity, is in Pieles an element surpassed: because these people do not need to prove to anyone that they are human beings, that they are equal to others, they already are, and they sometimes seem almost unaware of their diversity. The spirit of the film is completely different.

The director sets his stories against the backdrop of a scenography with exquisitely pastel tones, pink, purple, and glitter in abundance, which highlights his deformed characters in a grotesque light. Casanova plays a lot with aesthetics, deliberately accentuating the sugary perfection of the backgrounds, which look like those of a dollhouse or a Wes Anderson film, to throw anti-aesthetic characters into them. The intent to shock and amaze the viewer is clear, but the visual setup does not flatten the characters; on the contrary, it provides them with a supporting structure of definite scenic impact. A clever move that makes Pieles an even more controversial film, on the border between freak show and serious film. It is neither of the two things, or a bit of both, but certainly, the aesthetic plays a fundamental role and manages to make alluring and captivating something that is presumed to be the exact opposite. Flaunting to excess, showing at all costs what one doesn't want to see. But in this flaunting, there is both art and humanity, and the union of the two makes Pieles capable of astonishing, shocking, and moving. And there will be, as always in these cases, someone who scoffs and nothing more, and I too will always scoff when I meet one.