Unique
bonds are formed between several characters in Pedro Almodovar’s new opus, the
unexpectedly moving Talk to Her; a film with the power to elicit the
audience’s forgiveness when certain key players commit heinous acts of
passion. An action that would normally be perceived as appallingly wrong when
featured in any other film, seems understandable and even slightly forgivable in
the Spain-bred auteur’s follow-up to his Academy award winning 1999 hit, All
About My Mother. This remark is a testament to how much emotion the audience
has invested in the film’s characters.
The
strength of Talk to Her doesn’t lie in its ability to absolve
characters from our grudges, but in how Almodovar humanizes people most
conservative civilians would consider despicable. However, the truly
mind-boggling aspect is that there are so many other elements to this film –
it’s also about loneliness, storytelling, placing new spins on old movie clichés.
The list goes on.
It’s difficult to discuss the plot without souring its freshness. Yet stating
the plot in simple terms doesn’t do it justice. But I’ll take a shot: During
a performance of choreographer Pina Bausch’s spectacle, Café Muller, a
piece where two women sleepwalk through a chair-riddled stage while their lover
caringly knocks the obstacles out of the females’ path, Benigno (Javier
Camara), a loner among the audience, notices that the man sitting next to him,
Marco (Dario Grandinetti), is so moved by this play to the extent tears swell in
his eyes. At this point, both men are strangers to one another, but as the film
progresses, Benigno and Marco build a relationship so touching that the most
masculine of men will be shook.
How the two male protagonists meet again (post- Café Muller) has to do
with the women in their lives. Benigno, a nurse by profession, spends most of
his time in the clinic tending to Alicia (Leonor Watling), the woman he secretly
loves despite her being in a coma for the past four years. Marco, journalist by
profession, becomes a regular at the same clinic where Benigno is employed after
his professional bullfighter girlfriend, Lydia (Rosario Flores), is gored during
one of her duals and now she too lays unconscious in a coma.
Benigno continually suggests to Marco that if he wants to feel some
connection with Lydia, he needs to “talk to her”; much like the soft-spoken
nurse does with Alicia. Benigno is so devoted to his ‘patient’ that he even
sees the type of films (old silent ones) she would see, so he can tell the
sleeping beauty about it later on. This moral dilemma raises many questions, the
main one being whether it’s acceptable for someone to fall in love with
another who cannot respond in any physical or emotional way.
There
is an interlude midway through Talk to Her where Almodovar decides to
show one black-and-while silent film, an original story he wrote and directed,
as Benigno is narrating it to Alicia. The silent short, an amusingly surreal (Bunuel-like)
film titled The Shrinking Lover, is not meant to halt the story, but to
conceal what’s really occurring on-screen. Using it as a cover isn’t only an
intelligent way to keep the plot ambiguous, but it also allows his short film to
play as something other than filler.
GRADE: A-
-Copyright
2002 by Shaun Sages