Harry here, once... not long ago, I received a cel phone call from a person at SONY CLASSICS that said he was going to be screening this for me in Austin soon. (tap tap tap) (twidling my thumbs) AHEM... Here's a wonderful review from the Mississippi Mermaid, and man does it sound like another great film from Almodovar.... Here you go!
« Talk to Her »
a film by Pedro Almodovar
I just saw this movie (in Spanish - a language I don't speak) with French subtitles (a language I do speak). I haven't seen any reviews of this up, and don't know if you're interested or not. But if ever.. here goes.
I'll preface this by saying I'm not all that familiar with Almodovar's work. I did love « All About my Mother » and « Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown ».
« Talk to Her » is sedate (by Almodovar's standards). The raucous surrealism of some of his past work is missing here (with the exception of a «movie-within-the-movie » that foreshadows the main plot twist which I won't reveal). But he is still pushing the envelope in a big way. He reminds me of the comment made in a play by a Tennessee Williams character: "nothing that is human repulses me, only unkindness does" or words to that effect.
The story concerns two men who are in love with two comatose women. Sounds sedate, huh ? It isn't though. The movie deals with obsessive love, but not in a (politically correct) negative light. If there is a man (gay or straight) alive who loves women, their bodies, their conversation more than Almodovar, I've never seen his movie. The two men (one a journalist, the other a nurse in a hospital which cares for the long-term comatose) meet when the journalist's toreador girlfriend is gored in the bullring and remains in a coma. The nurse tells the broken-hearted journalist not to despair : « talk to her ».
The two men become friends. The nurse, Benigno, spends his days and nights tending a lovely young ballerina Alicia. The girl has been comatose for years following a traffic accident. But it isn't a coincidence that Benigno has become her care-giver. Before her accident, he lived across the street from the ballet school where the girl trained and where the lonely Benigno would spend hours watching her dance through the windows facing his apartment. Benigno is sexually ambiguous, a self-confessed virgin who spent most of his childhood and youth caring for an ailing mother. After his mother's death and Alicia's accident, he follows his heart to devote himself entirely to keeping the girl from slipping away, to « talking to her ». He dresses her up, cuts her hair, bathes her and talks about everything he has seen, done, heard, thought, felt. She becomes the unconscious repository of his hopes and dreams.
Almodovar's sly humor is still in evidence. One wisecrack about the sexual proclivities of priests gets a bigger laugh these days than he probably intended when it was filmed. Alicia's psychiatrist father (embarrassed by Benigno's physical contact with his daughter) asks him « what his sexual orientation is ». The nurse repeats the story to colleagues « he asked me what my 'sexual orientation was', you know sort of American for « are you a fag ? »). But Almodovar is less interested in making the audience laugh than in making them feel how magical it is to love someone, how desperate it is to lose them, how artificial society's taboos can seem when you are blinded by devotion. His film is about love and the boundaries it won't respect, about how redemption can be found in the strangest places. To get there, he tips his hat at Charlie Chaplin's « Limelight », at « That Obscure Object of Desire », « The Collector » even at « Weekend at Bernie's ».
Yet he makes a film that is wholly his own, tending his actors and his story as lovingly and devotedly as Benigno does his Alicia.
Yours,
the "Mississippi Mermaid"
