Skin deep

Shi gan (Time)

(2006)

This is what Vertigo would be like, if the obsession were mutual and lots more obsessive. I thought about it a lot in the early image-shaping scenes of the Almodóvar yesterday. It doesn't quite rate the 5 stars I gave it when I first saw it, but it certainly merits its place on my top-ten foreign list for 2007 (U.S. release)--it is, I find, the only one of those 10 I've yet returned to. The atmospherics are remarkable and consistently unsettling, and the erotic sculpture garden (based on one on Jeju Island, I guess, but more sophisticated than the images I can find of that one) is worthy of its own film.