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| Talk To Her (Hable Con Ella) |
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  (9/10)
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Runtime: 112 |
| Public Rating: 8.13 (15 votes) |
Director: Pedro Almodovar |
MPAA Rating:  |
| Genre: comedy/ drama/ romance |
Year: 2002 |
| Writer(s): Pedro Almodovar |
| Distributor: 1 |
| Reviewed by: Avril Carruthers |
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Starring Javier Cámara, Darío Grandinetti, Leonor Watling, Rosario Flores, Geraldine Chaplin, Adolfo Fernández, Chus Lampreave, Lores León, Helio Pedregal, Pina Bausch, Caetano Veloso.
Pedro Almodóvar is known for his wonderful high camp, hysterically funny, sentimental and bizarre comedies as well as for the trenchant authenticity of his subjects. This is the most restrained and the most delicate of his movies that I have seen. It’s mostly a gentle tale about various faces of love, loss, devotion and friendship with some extraordinary characters and uncommon situations. Into the main stories are interwoven moving performances of modern ballet, a romantic singer and even a wedding (which is definitely a performance), all of which affect the main characters emotionally and which allegorise significant parts of the characters’ lives.
Benigno (Javier Cámara) is tending to a beautiful young woman’s hands and face as a beautician does to a client. He is gentle and attentive, even loving, telling her about the Pina Bausch performance he saw the night before – an agonised woman, her eyes closed, careening across a stage littered with tables and chairs, which a male hastily pushes out of her way. Benigno also tells her about the man who was sitting next to him, weeping with emotion. It is only when he presents to her a signed photograph of the artiste which he has got for her that we realise she is not a beauty salon client lying there with her eyes closed, but comatose. Benigno is a male nurse, one of two nurses responsible for round-the-clock care of Alicia (Leonor Watling) for the past four years. He talks to her constantly and frequently responds to her as though she is communicating back. He and another nurse wash her and dress her in a clean bedgown with meticulous neatness, folding the sheet with a precision that is almost an art form.
Meanwhile the emotional fellow who was sitting next to Benigno at the dance performance is watching a live TV interview of famed female bullfighter, Lydia. The talk show hostess probes her reluctant guest about her recent split with another bullfighter, El Niño, with the tenacity of a piranha. Lydia leaves the set abruptly. The emotional fellow, Marco Zuloaga (Darío Grandinetti) now fascinated, rings his editor with his intention to do a story on her. We next see him watching her at a bullfight where she is magnificent: an androgynous, mesmerising and totally focussed matador, strutting as proudly as any male. Rosario Flores plays Lydia with tense restraint, showing her driven nature and the deep pain beneath. It’s no wonder sad Marco resonates with her. Later, at a bar, strikingly feminine now, she agrees to let him talk to her if he will drive her home, hooking on to his arm as she pointedly walks past her ex. Later, the sensitivity and compassion given him by Grandinetti and the fact that Marco is also suffering loss, make him an empathic companion.
The stories of Benigno and Marco interweave and alternate. When Lydia is gored by a bull she ends up in a coma in the clinic where Benigno works. Their friendship begins with Benigno recognising Marco, and the tone is immediately intimate, both of them talking about things that matter deeply to them. The similarities of their situations also point out their differences. Marco feels so helpless with Lydia, unable to relate to her lacerated and comatose form, unable to bring himself to touch her, while Benigno constantly communicates with Alicia by touch and voice. Having looked after his invalid mother for twenty years, and Alicia for four, he confidently tells Marco that women need to be caressed and talked to, paid attention to. Sometimes appearing simple-minded, Benigno simply lives for Alicia, his loneliness banished and his life given meaning by his devotion.
The movie deals profoundly with romantic obsession and deep love. Benigno’s life was changed the moment he saw Alicia, before her accident, through the window of a ballet academy across the road from his apartment. During a brief meeting with her on the street after he returns her dropped wallet intact, she tells him with a young girl’s unforced joy about all the things she loves – ballet, silent movies and travel. Smitten, he makes an appointment with her psychiatrist father to gain access to their house with the possibility of seeing her. After the appointment, finding the receptionist temporarily absent, he opportunistically enters the family’s private quarters. We hear the shower and see Alicia’s refracted silhouette behind a thick glass wall. At this point we can already see that despite Benigno’s harmless intentions, he is seemingly unaware of the interpretation others may put on his actions. He manages to glimpse inside her room and souvenir a hairclip before she finds him in the hall and shakily asks him what he is doing there.
After her accident, she is brought fortuitously to the clinic where he becomes her nurse. He begins for the first time to attend the kinds of performances that she loved, telling her about them the next day. Later he counts those years as the richest in his life and it is clear she has become his raison d’être just as his mother was. He never disbelieves that she will wake up one day, keeping her hair cut as she had it when he first met her, and massaging her dancer’s legs to prevent muscle wastage. Coming upon Benigno’s massaging her thighs one day, Alicia’s father asks point blank about Benigno’s sexuality. Benigno reassures him that he is gay, in an innocently romantic subterfuge that is designed to pre-empt any paternal obstacle to his love.
Almodóvar prefaces each segment of the movie with a caption in a romantic cursive font of a character’s name or coupling each pair as they interact in love or friendship The device frames each relationship and softens them with a gentle sentimentality, though the relationships themselves are far more raw, savagely driven or painful and intensely real. His usual themes are there, though much less melodramatic than in some of his other films - the preoccupation with the mother, an inability to satisfy the father, the adoration of the feminine from afar, the gender blurring that comes from empathy and the differences between male and female which ultimately, despite adopting the outward trappings, cannot be completely understood.
Benigno attends a bizarre black-and-white silent film called The Shrinking Lover which we see in its entirety as he recounts it next day to Alicia. It has profoundly affected him and is the direct cause of an awakening in him with far-reaching consequences. It also shows us Benigno’s inner motivations, his deep, intimate desire to know Alicia and be a part of her, and goes a long way in giving us a balanced view on his actions later viewed as criminal and insane. It is an example of Almodóvar’s ability to allow the unconscious free rein in his movies, as is the various ways in which the male characters view the women, through glass windows, on a TV or film screen (another window), glimpsed through a half-open door, or on stage.
Marco and Benigno put their two comatose charges in lounge chairs on the sunny balcony, their sunglassed heads angled towards each other. Benigno whimsically wonders what the two women might be saying to each other, and though he himself has an almost telepathic connection with Alicia, both men feel a woman’s thoughts are a mystery. It is two months since Lydia was gored, and Marco remembers the unaccustomed tears running down Lydia’s face at the wedding they attended of Marco’s former lover Angela. Lydia asks obsessively whether he is truly over Angela, and on the way to the bullfight that is the cause of her injury quietly states that they must talk. Only much later does Marco find out the true purport of her concern.
While Benigno gets closer to Alicia, Marco finds himself ever more distant from Lydia, who is unrecognisable as he formerly knew her. One day he is released from his daily bedside vigil by Lydia’s former lover El Niño, whom he finds weeping and talking to her in the same intimate and conversational tone Benigno has with Alicia. He goes back to his job of writing travel guide booklets, many of which he gives to Benigno so he can read them to Alicia and take her on imaginary travels with him.
He is away for nearly a year until one day he reads that Lydia has died. Contacting the clinic he learns that Benigno no longer works there. In fact, he is in jail and desperately needs a friend. Marco rushes back and vows to help, but Benigno cannot live in a world without Alicia, and Marco is unable to save his friend. Marco moves into Benigno’s apartment at his request, across the street from the ballet academy.
The movie ends with another poignant dance performance which Marco attends, and an unexpected new beginning. Because of his tears he is noticed in the audience by a young lady chaperoned by the ballet mistress, Katerina (an elegant and regal Geraldine Chaplin) whom Marco recognises used to visit Alicia. They talk briefly in the interval after she notices him speaking to the young lady. He explains he was simply responding to a question she had asked him. Totally aware of an electric subtext between them, Katerina scoffs, “Simple! I am a ballet mistress, and believe me, nothing is simple!” With this richly emotive scene Marco’s life has turned around, just as Benigno’s did so many years before with Alicia. The last note is optimistic and expectantly joyful.
© Avril Carruthers 24th February 2003
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