Talk to Her

There are many who say that "Todo Sobre Mi Madre" is his best film, but now that I've seen both these movies, I give the nod - by a long way - to "Hable con Ella". This is a masterpiece, and not just because of the poignancy of the characters, or the story in general, or the way the scenes are shot - watching the matador get dressed was quite engrossing - but EVERYTHING comes together so wonderfully. The brilliance of Spanish-language films never fails to amaze me, and this is another one in that long line of greatness. There will be times where the viewer may feel somewhat uncomfortable with the characters and their actions, but that does not stop Almodovar from exploring such emotions; indeed, one sometimes gets the impression that Almodovar's entire purpose is to make you analyze your own feelings - and simply does it better than anyone else. Recommended for anyone who can read subtitles.

Pedro Almodovar's "Talk to Her" is as suprisingly sweet as it is profoundly disturbing. It is an examination of the nature of love that attempts to challenge our idea of what love is by taking it to its very limits. The lead character is a typical sad sack; slightly disturbed, isolated and sexually inexperienced. He spends his days staring out of his window at a rapturously beautiful dancer, and tries to form a relationship with her by becoming a patient at her father's psychiatric practice. This eventually leads to disaster when he sneaks into her room to steal an item of hers and finds her just coming out of the shower. But the guy perseveres. After spending years looking after his mother (Who wasn't an invalid, she just didn't like moving very much) he gains a degree in nursing and works with camatose patients. To his joy, one of the camatose patients turns out to be the dancer, and so now he can spend all day expressing and demonstrating his love for her. At least, you could see it that way. Or you could see it as an innocent and helpless girl delivered into the hands of a sexual deviant stalker who now can manhandle her and fantacise about her in any way he pleases. I think you can guess by now where the film is heading, and when the ultimate act is committed, Almodovar presents it in such a way as to show the audience how it could be interpreted as an act of love and selflessness. We never see the act itself, only the man's interpretation of it, and the sequence is, suprisingly, quite funny and, in strange way, touching. But that does not alter the fact that Almodovar is attempting to make rape emotionally acceptable. The film makes this particularly clear by its ending, which, if you have been following this review, I am sure you could also guess. Call me a prude, but I have always felt that love that is only felt by one person is not truly love. True love is something that built by two people by constant attention and care. If I tell someone, "I love you" and she cannot say "I love you too," then I am only really in love with an illusion, not a person.

I think Almodovar is portraying a common male fantasy by portraying a Benigno obsessed and in love with a beautiful comatose woman. She is beautiful, sexually yielding, and doesn't have a functioning brain. In a way, it is like the Stepford Wives, where women are merely sexually attractive robots that do not possess any real intellect or consciousness, and certainly not the ability to refuse sex.

Benigno and Marco are both lonely men, Marco because his lover, a woman bullfighter, is in a coma, Benigno, a thirty-year old virgin Momma's boy, from habit. Both are in love, too (Benigno, a male nurse at the clinic, slavishly tends Alicia, a comatose accident victim, for a living). It is he who gives Marco, with whom he strikes up a friendship, the eponymous advice: talk, and your heartfelt monologue will be more meaningful and therapeutic than any marital dialogue.

Seeing Almodóvar's latest film was one of the most pleasurable cinema experiences I have had for some time. He has over the years amassed the technical skill and maturity to put across quite complex stories in a deceptively simple language. From the shock tactics and punk aesthetics of Pepi, Luci, Bom, y otras chicas del montón (1980), to the Oscar-winning melodrama of All About My Mother (1999), he had already come a long way. Here, finally, was an interweaving of the lives of disparate characters that was not only unabashed in its excess (it always had been), it actually made you care – deeply.

More bullfighting

At first sight Hable con ella looks like being another case study in that famously offbeat, not to say queer, book of life according to Pedro. Almodóvar's scenarios have been no strangers to sex, drugs, and heartrending canción (a particular brand of overwrought singing which knows no real Anglo-Saxon equivalent). In Hable con ella we have bullfighting, a theme he used as an excuse for kinky sex in Matador, given a contemporary treatment in the person of 'torera', Lydia (female bullfighters are indeed beginning to compete in a man's profession). Here too we have the apparently off-the-wall and by now notorious scene from the film-within-the-film, El Amante Minguante, in which a shrunken hero takes refuge in his lover's vagina for protection. But neither is gratuitous gesture: Lydia is designed to counterpoint Marco's almost feminine sensitivity, and the latter sequence, far from being there to shock, is a metaphor to spare us a far more harrowing, and morally problematic, plot truth. The ability to turn kitsch into art is increasingly one of Almodóvar's defining features.

Post-modern?

While he often refers to other artforms in his films (reality TV in Kika, Ruth Rendell in Live Flesh, canción in High Heels), since All About My Mother the technique has become more assured. Where that film was a paean to female suffering, via All About Eve and A Streetcar Named Desire, in Hable con ella we have two men sharing a tear over a performance by the dancer Pina Bausch. Other references are the Brazilian singer Caetano Veloso, who sings at a party attended by (uncredited) Cecilia Roth and Marisa Paredes (from Mother), and Michael Cunningham, whose novel The Hours similarly has a tripartite structure where each section deepens and sheds light on the others ('tunnels in caves'). In other words the post-modernist borrowing is rendered invisible by being absorbed into the drama: it is not post-modern any more.

Almodóvar's choice to make a film about the loneliness and longing of men is a courageous one for a very private celebrity, a gamble to follow what might have been the peak of his career, and one which whets our appetite for what is to come.

TALK TO HER (2002) **** Javier Camara, Dario Grandinetti, Leonor Watling, Rosario Flores, Mariola Fuentes, Geraldine Chaplin. Filmmaker Pedro Almodovar once again creates a cinematic masterpiece in his ongoing quest to bring together the war of the sexes as a harmonic convergence this time in a somewhat surreal matter involving a male nurse (Camara) and a tough yet sensitive journalist (Grandinetti) who form a unique friendship when his girlfriend, a bullfighter (Flores), is gored and sent into a coma landing her in the hospital where Camara is taking care of his ‘beloved' (Watling), a dancer, who he has fallen in love with her when he (in a sense) was stalking her. Love, sex, desire and social ills fall into one heady mix of melodrama, soap opera fodder and a sprinkling of comedy as well as a memorable foray into silent cinema with `The Shrinking Lover' (think of an NC-17 version of `The Incredible Shrinking Man') that actually serves as a Greek chorus as to the happenings occurring. Controversial, bold and audacious in its execution yet ultimately haunting, harrowing and altogether human (and humane). One of the year's best films.