Parle avec elle

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.

'Hable con ella' aka 'Talk to Her' (2002) is a powerful cinematic experience…It is not the best Almodovar and the narration is not a pristine one as more affective details could have been added. Yet the movie succeeds on so many levels. Why is that so? An original scenario and a bunch of very good actors might very well be the answer. Very baroque at time, adept of kitsch atmospheres Mr. Almodovar also has a cinematic sense of parody as well as drama. His style became famous out of Spain with movie like 'Women on the verge of a Nervous Breakdown' (1988), High Heels (1991) and Kika (1993). 'Talk to her' is no exception. It is baroque in the topic, kitsch in the atmosphere and dramatic in the output. The movie not only talks about friendship between two men but also about loneliness and wounds provoked by passion. It demonstrates how monologue can become dialogue and how silence is in fact 'eloquence of the body'. In between those silences, Benigno Martin (Javier Camera) and soon Marco Zuluaga (Dario Grandinetti) use words as weapons: weapons against Solitude first, against Death and against Madness…Yes Madness is another theme in this movie but not the 'dark madness', not the 'killing madness', but the type that is so close to tenderness and common sense that it becomes almost normality and that's exactly where Mr. Almodovar succeeds.

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.

This is a film about men and their emotions. One man has a relationship with a woman, the most famous female matador in Spain. He cries over the most strange things. The female matador gets in a coma. The other man is in love with a woman, he has only spoken to her once. The man is a male nurse and when the woman gets in a coma he is the one to take care of her. Some people around him thinks he is gay so he is allowed to take care of her, see her naked, touch her. The two men get to know each other while waiting at the beds of their loved ones.

I will not reveal what happens with the two women, or with the men. The way the subject is handled is great. In one way we see the two man devoting their lives two women. In another way we see the creepy part of that. For example we know the male nurse is in love with the one he is taking care of, and as I said, he sees naked every day. The woman seems to be an obsession, the man seems to be obsessed. We have sympathy for the men anyway.

The acting is good, a very intelligent story and a great direction makes this film one of the year's best. In the end you will have a strange feeling, and a good feeling as well.

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.