Parla con lei

I had absolutely no idea what to expect when I watched 'Hable Con Ella'. All I knew was that it was directed by Pedro Almodovar, who is considered as one of the biggest talents outside of Hollywood. Well, he certainly has some talent. A talent to make movies that are not always easy to watch, but certainly thought provoking, beautiful, compelling and stylish.

'Hable Con Ella' tells the story of two men who are in love with a woman in a coma and how they both handle this in a different way. They meet each other in the hospital with a beautiful friendship between the two men as a result.

Pedro Almodovar is some kind of artist who likes to paint with words and images. As a result you get a beautiful tale about obsession, love, friendship and desperation, which may not be to everybody's taste because of the bizarre subject, but which certainly touched me. It's very original and I would recommend it to everybody who isn't afraid to watch a movie with a special subject. I give it a 9/10

Rating **** out of ****

Spanish Writer-Director Pedro Almodovar is a filmmaker that always captures strange, and honest moments within his characters emotions-especially women. Such films as "All About My Mother", and "Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown" support this, but in Almodovar's latest film "Talk To Her"--he does something a little different by making men the protagasnits. It's brilliant, unique, and creative filmmaking at its best. However beneath all the brilliance is a lovely, sweet film that is charming in its own little way.

Almodovar crafts "Talk to Her" with a style that is unique in color and tone, and it has behavioral exposition that is far more mature and tonally sustained than anything he's done before. But the plot is insane as anything that Almodovar's has done before, which makes the movie more of a career-peak change, its a masterpiece constructed on the solid foundation of everything he's previously tried and learned. The movie's great, bad-boy conceit is that its two heroes, wounded-in-love journalist Marco (Dario Grandinetti) and naive nurse Benigno (Javier Camara), are hopelessly in love with women they can't communicate with -- and that really gives the two guys something to talk about, as well as a base for the strongest of friendships. Not that their women are intentionally unreachable; both, you see, are in comas.

By the end of this crazy, heart-thrilling tale, Almodovar has delivered us through un unexpecting film of humor, human emotions, specific human connections, remorse, and philosophies. "Talk to Her" is more than just a run of a talked about foreign film, and having Oscar-Nomination potential-it is one of the best movies of 2002.

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.

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.

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.