Second Skin (Segunda Piel). (Film review: thin skin).

Second Skin (Segunda Piel) * Written by Angeles Gonzalez Sinde * Directed by Gerardo Vera * Starring Javier Bardem, Jordi Molla, Cecilia Roth * Menemsha Entertainment

Two of the past decade's most memorable screen performances came from Spanish actors Cecilia Roth and Javier Bardem: she as the aggrieved matriarch in All About My Mother and he as poet Reinaldo Arenas in Before Night Falls. It would be lovely to report they are on a roll, but even gifted actors have to slum to get the rent paid until the next plum part comes along.

Bardem and Roth give it their all in Second Skin, a stupefying daytime soap in movie clothing that might be better titled As the World Grinds to a Dead Halt. Bardem plays a gay surgeon named Diego who becomes the unwitting spoiler in a troubled marriage. Sweethearts since high school, Alberto (Jordi Molla) and Elena (Ariadna Gil) love each other dearly but have failed to develop effective communication skills, a flaw that becomes pathetically evident when the deeply closeted Alberto begins to sleep with Diego on the side.

Elena knows something is up--a wife knows these things--but Alberto is a deft manipulator of the truth. For a time he manages to keep both his lover and his wife in the dark about each other's existence, parceling out his time with each of them in sly, abrupt comings and goings that succeed in making everyone miserable. Roth is along for the ride as Bardem's sympathetic colleague and bitching buddy, the one who's been there, done that, and knows a stinker when she sees one.

Of course, we've all been on this merry-go-round on one horse or another. But neither the identification factor nor the sweaty sex compensates for eyeball-rolling dialogue, tortured music, and a howler of a windup that serves up a pre-Stonewall (if not pre-Barbara Stanwyck) notion of poetic justice. Is there a Spanish word for oy vay?

Stuart is film critic and senior writer at Newsday.