Bandaged

What a strange movie this was. And not in a good way. Despite Bandaged being 88 minutes of moving pictures and something resembling a narrative, I finished watching and my first thought was that this hardly even counts as a film. It felt like I had watched the first draft of something that needed at least three additional drafts before it was worth releasing as a finished product.

Bandaged is about a girl named Lucille who disfigures her face in a suicide attempt. Her father works obsessively to restore his daughter’s face. He also hires a nurse to care for Lucille named Joan. Joan and Lucille pretty immediately develop an intense, obsessive relationship.

Bandaged already started at a deficit with me. The plot line of weird plastic surgeon who makes a woman with ambiguous feelings towards him look like his dead wife is also the plot of The Skin I Live In. And The Skin I Live In is exceptional. It’s incredibly effective and is one of the most fucked up movies I’ve ever seen. It’s even got some adjacent WLW film cred. Actress Elena Anaya from Room in Rome plays the female lead and the film is directed by Pedro Almodóvar who’s done numerous LGBTQ*-themed films in his career including multiple WLW films. Because The Skin I Live In already exists and I’d already seen it, perhaps unfairly, I constantly measured Bandaged’s quality and effectiveness using the similar The Skin I Live In as a measuring stick. In each regard, Bandaged fell short every single time.

Bandaged is deeply boring. Every scene goes on way too long and there isn’t very much plot. It’s mostly just scenes of medical procedures followed by overly long sexual moments between Joan and Lucille. Again, just because one of the participant’s face is wrapped up, doesn’t make this interesting or shocking. The climax of the film comes far too late and is far too bland to be satisfactory. Bandaged is just a whole lotta nothing and then credits.

The main premise of this film is flawed. The theory behind Bandaged seems to be, anything normal can be creepy if one of the characters is someone in a full-face bandage. That premise works at most twice. After that, any small shock value or discomfort drops to about zero due to simple repetition. Bandaged really doesn’t get this. As a film, it really seems to think that a girl in bandages is enough of a creepy-factor to sustain a 88 minute film. It isn’t.

Also, talk about unrealistic standards of beauty. Lucille is stunning. Even while spending most or all of her days wrapped in full-face bandages, she still seems to always wear a full-face of makeup. And her scar isn’t even that bad! I guess one can say this is the father’s influence, making Lucille feel more deformed than she is so he can make her look more like his dead wife. However, this is hardly explained so instead, as a viewer, I’m left with a story that shows a girl who thinks she’s hideous and is wrapped in inches of bandage only for it to be unwound and there’s a two, small scars on her cheek. It just felt like the film was afraid to make a victim of facial disfiguration not sexy.

Bandaged is the cinematic equivalent of a a dead eel; cold, unpleasant and lifeless. It is occasionally unsettling but mostly it is dull. You can’t hinge an entire film on the visual of a pretty girl with a bandaged face. That’s not enough to support a movie. Even the fact that Bandaged has like, a lot of explicit WLW content doesn’t warm me to it. All the lesbian stuff felt like filler to drag this movie past the hour-mark despite this movie only having at most, ten minutes of ideas. Don’t see this movie. If the premise is somewhat intriguing, just go see The Skin I Live In. That’s the movie that Bandaged feels like the first draft of.

Overall rating. 3.6/10

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