Director/writer: Pedro Almodovar
Photography: Javier Aguirresarobe
Music: Alberto Iglesias
Editor: Jose Salcedo
Cast: Javier Cámara, Darío Grandinetti, Leonor Watling, Rosario Flores, Mariola Fuentes, Geraldine Chaplin, Fele Martínez, Paz Vega, Caetono Veloso, Ana Fernandez, Chus Lampreave, Esther Garcia
I haven't seen many of Pedro Almodovar's movies but they've all been reasonably good at flummoxing me, so full disclosure on that point, which is arguably in its favor. I'm not sure whether the effect is something about his work or the circumstances under which I've seen it. Certainly the day I saw Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, when it was new, was a notably bad one for me, though it had little to do with the movie. But the movie didn't help. The more recent The Skin I Live In also left me cold—too much arch concept and, as a creepshow, with the effect of an insect buzzing around one's ears after dark. Getting the insect to desist as often as not leads to boxing one's own ears, so in many ways the result is an awkward sitting tight and hoping it goes away soon, not exactly what I'm looking for in a movie.
I can see there's a lot to like about Talk to Her, even if it does surprise me a little to find it so highly regarded, occupying the critical consensus top 10 of the best movies of the 21st century (according to the list at They Shoot Pictures, Don't They?). The music by Alberto Iglesias is beautiful, almost distractingly so in some points. The images are nearly as alluring; Almodovar's colors may not be as saturated as on earlier pictures, but they are rich and full, accompanied by a sure hand with the staging and fluid camera. And the narrative is a kind of model of clarity, moving transparently from plot point to plot point. These formal qualities operate almost invisibly to propel the very strange story about the love of two men for women in comas—specific women who have suffered profound injuries, I should add, as opposed to some more generalized fetish—and the subsequent friendship engendered between them, a friendship marked as much by loss of identity as by love.
It's weird, and calculatedly so, mixing up and playing with gender identity, displaying little regard for limits or propriety, yet done so artfully that one finds oneself accepting outrageous behavior and images as much for the sake of getting on with the story as for any other reason. It goes to some strange places but never feels out of control. I like it best when it's just people talking to one another, connecting, however oddly. And I like it least when it appears pleased with itself as some sort of impish (or, worse, transgressive) comedy. But I have to admit I'm not sure I get what it is doing. For some help with that I turned to the commentary track on the DVD, which featured Almodovar and one of the supporting players here, Geraldine Chaplin.
But in many ways that only exacerbated my problems. Almodovar came off to me as smug and self-satisfied, with wry pronunciamentos such as "Whoever speaks, loves." He seems to be operating in a very specific space, intended to be unconventional but actually loaded down with conventionality: a circumscribed view of male heterosexual perspective on women, which is so formally loving and adoring that it succeeds chiefly in creating and maintaining an emotional distance only masquerading as intimacy. This is established as early as the opening sequence, when Benigno (Javier Camara) and Marco (Dario Grandinetti) are seen together in the audience at a dance performance, before they even know one another, watching women suffer and profoundly moved by it.
"The film is about words ... about someone who talks," Almodovar says at one point. And it's true that talking is practically all Benigno does. A nurse, he is also trained in manicure, massage, makeup, and hairdressing. Above all else he appears to be a gentle soul, and he is. He talks to everyone in his orbit generally, as a matter of his personality and conviction, but specifically to the comatose woman under his care in hospital, Alicia (Leonor Watling), a dancer. But talking is not the only thing Benigno does. Almodovar devotes a lot of screen time to the rituals of Alicia's care, to the daily routines of washing her, changing her bed and her gown, deliberately invoking the mute testimony of the beauty of her body again and again. Almodovar has highest praise for Watling's performance of a coma. But Benigno's problems in this story belie the assertion that it's just a film about words and talking, though in fairness Almodovar never shrinks from plumbing the depths of Benigno's psychopathic tendencies. Even what little we see of it is amply convincing that he is capable of the outrage that eventually falls into the center of the picture.
Besides the male nurse there's also a female bullfighter, Lydia (Rosario Flores), with whom the journalist Marco falls in love before she becomes comatose herself. All of these elements together—the dancers, the bullfighting, and the comas in hospital rooms—create unique and unusual sets of visual circumstances that keep the whole thing interesting even when the narrative appears to be losing its mind. There's also a silent film within the film that's done pretty well, particularly the staging and performances, though the cinematography is just a little too ostentatiously excellent. And by the time it enters on an elaborate vagina scene it loses all credibility as artifact—and as plot point too, though it remains weird enough you still can never look away.
The best parts of Talk to Her, for me, lie in the characters and the performances, and the easy way it navigates its story. As outlandish as these people and their circumstances can become they never lose their grip on our attention. Benigno, for example, is never entirely sympathetic and never entirely a monster either, roaming at will in the shadows of the gulf between, a collaborative result of both Almodovar's meticulous construction of him and Camara's brilliantly nuanced interpretation of him. He's the single most important character here—Marco seems to be around primarily as witness and to illustrate the fungibility of a personality, and the women spend most of their time in comas. It's a pretty good trick to make Benigno so likeable and so unlikeable all at once. I'm just not sure what the point of the trick was.
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