Almodovar's new movie is calmer and less floridly extravagant, less wired than many of his previous films. Yet every frame bears his signature: the theatricality, the mischievously effective suspense, the adventures in identity and sexuality. It's the most unmistakable auteur flourish in modern European cinema, from a director who unblushingly announces himself in the opening credits simply by his surname: "A film by Almodovar."
Talk to Her is the parallel story of two men's love for women who are in comas. One is Marco (Dario Grandinetti), a macho travel writer who has fallen in love with Lydia (Rosario Flores), a female bullfighter, gored half to death in a mysterious suicidal gesture, and now immobile on a life-support machine. The other is Benigno (Javier Camara), a gentle male nurse: gay, or possibly bi, tending to Alicia (Leonor Watling), a beautiful dancer in a persistent vegetative state, while chatting to her teacher and regular visitor, the angular, elegant Geraldine Chaplin.
Raptly, he gives Alicia bed baths and talks to her, believing that in some sense she can hear him, and that her silence is eloquent, nuanced, supportive. Most importantly, he encourages Marco to talk to his patient, too. Marco never masters Benigno's ability here - but Marco and Benigno talk to each other; they strike up a friendship and cultivate the emotional intelligence predicted in the opening scene when they find themselves sitting next to each other at a dance performance. Yet this is disrupted when Benigno's delusion of a relationship with Alicia runs out of control and he is accused of rape.
Watching the movie took me back 26 years to something similar yet very different: Dennis Potter's then controversial play Brimstone and Treacle. In that, a devilish stranger rapes a helpless young girl in a coma. The oppressiveness, the prurience, the horrible thin-lipped Englishness and misery in Potter's vision could not be more different from what happens in the Mediterranean sunshine of Almodovar's film, despite some interestingly matching plot incidentals. (And it's miles away from the sinister spectacle of a coma-stricken Sunny von Bulow having her limbs manipulated by nurses in Reversal of Fortune.)
The action of Talk to Her could be horrific, or at the very least nauseating. Yet such is the imaginative warmth that Almodovar conveys for his two male leads, combined with his stylisation and modification of the real world in which the rape happens, revulsion is neutralised through a combination of sympathy and alienation. Almodovar so expertly manages his movie's perspectives that the rape looks like a subsidiary event in an essentially heartwarming, tragicomic fable of "relationships". It leaves unanswered the question of how exactly we are supposed to think and feel about this rape, or if it is a rape at all.
Almodovar is revered as a director of women, yet it is the men who are the focus here, turning hospital beds into pedestals on which to place their loved ones. They have no problem getting in touch with their female side. Feminine sensitivity is a male prerogative. Javier Camara's Benigno is plump, personally diffident, professionally forthright yet sensitive with his patients, a little camp, but not blatantly so. As Marco, Dario Grandinetti is tough and masculine - a female nurse reckons he is well hung - though unashamed to show his tears when moved by drama or music.
He is entranced by Rosario Flores's Lydia, particularly her exotically complex persona as a female bullfighter. The camera lingers on Lydia's ceremonial suiting-up process, like the robing of a priest before mass, and indeed like the way Alicia's bedgown is ritually changed and adjusted.
Benigno's fetishisation of Alicia is inspired by seeing a silent film, Shrinking Lover. This is a black and white pastiche sequence that Almodovar plunges into with relish. A scientist accidentally swallows a shrinking potion and roams erotically over the landscape of his lover's body, like Gulliver with the serving maids in Brobdingnag, finally diving ecstatically into her vagina. It is an act of reverential worship, not penetration - which is how, presumably, poor Benigno thinks of his own transgression.
All this objectification comes to a crisis when Benigno confesses to Marco his crazy plan to marry Alicia, a scheme to which he is convinced he has her consent. "A woman's brain is a mystery," explodes Marco, "and in this state even more so!" But the men are in a state of their own and their brains' workings are just as much of a mystery.
Talk to Her is a more persuasive film than the overpraised, overheated All About My Mother. (That film's star, Cecilia Roth, makes an uncredited appearance here.) The central question is: does Almodovar's Bunuelian surreality, however restrained here, heighten and poeticise the sexual issues? Or is it just a sneaky way of raising the stakes and lowering them again? I think it's the former, simply because of the innocent, almost childlike compassion that suffuses this movie. Maybe more than any other director, Almodovar creates his own world, entire of itself, with its own ecosystem of pleasure and pathos.
