Juan Gatti has been working with Pedro Almodóvar since 1988, but his teaser poster for The Skin I Live In, the baroque Spanish director's new film, marks a significant departure for the Argentinian graphic designer.
Gatti's earlier work was indebted to Saul Bass and Andy Warhol, sometimes wittily so; compare Gatti's titles for Volver, in which thick rectangular lines form themselves into tableclothes and wallpaper patterns, with Bass's classic expressionistic opening sequence for The Man with the Golden Arm, or his posters for Tie Me Up, Tie Me Down (aka Átame) with some of Bass's most celebrated work, particularly his unforgettable advert for Anatomy of a Murder.
As for the Warhol influence, Gatti's poster for Volver, with its bright, non-realist blocks of colour, recalls the Pittsburgh artist's famous portraits of Marilyn Monroe, Jackie Kennedy, and Ingrid Bergman, particularly in the composition, and the subject's artificially pale skin tone and unnaturally bright lips.
Gatti's principal poster for The Skin I Live In is reasonably straightforward – even artlessly so. Antonio Banderas leans over the shoulder of Elena Anaya, whose face is wrapped in a plastic surgical mask. Two red scars or guide markings for a surgeon can be seen running down her neck, adding to the disturbing mood. Banderas's brown eyes stare just beyond the camera; Anaya's right into it. He looks determined and sinister, she frightened and nervous. Gatti makes the film's title appear much clearer and more in focus than the photograph it rests upon – an attractive touch. But the red-lettered cast list – the same font used to much better effect for the movie's titles and intertitles – is slightly unreadable, as are both instances of Almodóvar's name.
Much more interesting and successful is the teaser poster Gatti has produced for the film (above). Set out so as to recall the title page of a book, the poster features on its right-hand side only the director's credit and the name of the film, with every word capitalised in a self-consciously literary fashion. On the left is a very Victorian image: a standing human body seen from the back, its skin removed to reveal its muscles, an image that cannot help but also remind one, today, of the controversial exhibitions of Gunther von Hagens. In style and execution it is straight out of an 18th or 19th century anatomy textbook, yet around the body Gatti has placed images that would not be out of place in a botanical guide from the same era – enormous winding flowers and ferns as tall as the figure itself – as well as the incongruous images of a giant butterfly and a pink flamingo, this last almost the same colour as the muscles of the human body beside it.
It's an unsettling, unexpected image, executed very faithfully in its ultra-retro style, and combined with the film's title provokes a horrifying question in the viewer: where is the skin this person lives in? The poster's light-tan background colour could easily be meant to resemble aged, yellowing paper from a bygone era ... or it could be the skin this poor figure is missing.
I asked Gatti why he enjoyed collaborating with Almodóvar, for whom he has created 11 posters. "What I like about working with Pedro is that I really like what he does and he is generally very clear on what he wants," he said. "Sometimes we have disagreements – [we can both be] obsessive and stubborn – but these differences eventually enrich the final product."
He said that the teaser poster was indeed "a collage I made from images of anatomy, botany and science books of the 18th and 19th century". As for the main poster, Gatti said he wanted "more than anything [for it to] be attractive and not to distort the tone and the intention of the film", and said he felt it "transmitted a disturbing feeling, intriguing and somewhat perverse".
He added: "Generally I try to define and translate in images the intention, tone and message that the director wants without distorting it."
Gatti is usually responsible for all the graphic elements of the film, including appropriate props and decorations – a version of the flayed-body image can be seen in Banderas's office at one point in the film – the main titles, the poster, and "promotional items". His only brief is the script itself. In its own way, his teaser poster for The Skin I Live In is as disturbing, transgressive and inventive as the film that inspired it.
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