Talk to Her (113 mins, 15) Directed by Pedro Almodóvar; starring Javier Cámara, Darío Grandinetti, Leonor Watling, Rosario Flores, Geraldine Chaplin
Pedro Almodóvar has been making movies for a quarter of a century now, and like his compatriot and idol, Luis Buñuel, he has refined his art without losing its early force. Buñuel's aim in the late-1920s was to insult and stir up the hidebound bourgeoisie. In the mid-1970s, coinciding with the death of Franco, Almodóvar set out to shock and awaken a confused Spain. His deliberately offensive movies paraded an aggressively gay sensibility. As we started to say then, they were 'in your face', a term that, according to the OUP's 20th Century Words, originated in 1976. His films now resemble the beautifully crafted pictures the mature Buñuel made after returning to Europe in the 1960s.
Almodóvar's All About My Mother was one of the last great films of the twentieth century. Talk to Her ('Hable Con Ella') is one of the first great pictures of this century. They are superb pieces of storytelling with plots that would have appealed to Ernst Lubitsch or Preston Sturges but wouldn't get past any Hollywood mogul today except as a remake. Talk to Her begins with two men, Benigno (Javier Cámara) and Marco (Darío Grandinetti), strangers to each other, sitting in adjoining seats at an avant-garde ballet performance by the Pina Bausch company. On stage, two sleepwalking women dance around the stage and are prevented from crashing into the furniture by a male dancer deftly pulling it aside. The two men, both in their forties, are crying, which is something we don't expect at the start of a film. But what are they crying about? Is it the spectacle they observe or something they're reminded of? In a sense this movie - which is a combination of black comedy, tragedy and romance - could be called a 'men's weepie', and one of its themes is what reduces us to tears.
Benigno, it transpires, is a shy, slightly plump nurse at a private hospital. Marco, an Argentinian, is a handsome journalist sporting designer stubble, author of bestselling travel books that have taken him all over the world. The pair are brought together by their virtual worship of two women in deep coma in the same hospital. They're Alicia (Leonor Watling), a fair-haired ballet dancer injured in a traffic accident, whom Benigno attends to almost exclusively, and Lydia (Rosario Flores), a raven-haired matador, badly gored in a crucial corrida, to whom Marco is devoted. In flashbacks, and in one case a flashback within a flashback, Almodóvar shows us how the men met these obscure objects of desire and became attached to them. Around these two relationships he develops an intricately symmetrical story about friendship, transcendental love and loneliness.
The movie is as surprising and intriguing as a thriller, and it's often extremely funny. There's a hilarious scene in which a domineering talk show hostess on live TV attempts by physical force to keep the affronted woman matador from leaving the studio. There's also a sustained, erotic re-working of the SF B-feature The Incredible Shrinking Man as a classic silent movie called 'The Shrinking Lover'. Benigno sees it at the Madrid cinematheque so he has something to talk about to the comatose Lydia, a great fan of the silent cinema.
But though there's some gentle mockery here and there (of the pretentious ballet-teacher played by Geraldine Chaplin, for instance), virtually all the characters are viewed with sympathy and understanding, and none more so than Benigno, who in a key plot development acts in what most people would consider an unforgivably transgressive manner.
Photographed by Javier Aguirresarobe (whose last film was The Others), the film has nothing that seems gratuitous. Virtually every shot, gesture or piece of décor is germane to the plot and the movie's overall thrust. There's a brief cut, for example, to the bull after he's gored Lydia that makes him an indelible character in the film. The lava lamps on either side of Alicia's hospital bed are not merely decorative. They reflect both her condition of silent, mysterious living as well as Benigno's constantly raised and dashed hopes of her revival.
When Marco sits disconsolately beside the vegetative Lydia, Benigno cheerily urges him to 'talk to her', yet the film constantly presents people set apart - looking at the world through windows, talking to each other through panes of glass. But all this calculation doesn't make it a cold movie. On the contrary, while it avoids sentimentality, it's warm and humane. Years ago I described Buñuel's final film as resembling a Fabergé hand grenade. At the risk of sounding pretentious, I'd say that Talk to Her is like an exquisite Swiss watch powered by a Mediterranean heart.
