Talk to Her, an Almodovar feast
for the eyes and the heart

By María Eugenia Guerra

Talk to Her (Hable con Ella).
Rated R. 116 minutes.
Directed by Pedro Almodovar.
Music by Alberto Iglesias.
Spanish with Subtitles. It is a nearly mystical tenderness that Spanish filmmaker Pedro Almodovar sustains through all 116 minutes of the black comedy Talk to Her, even as he dips below the surface of the lives of the film's characters to tap into that which formed their hearts -- scandal, passion, loss, denial, desire, grace, and danger.
Talk to Her is a departure from Almodovar's rote use of female characters to tell the story. In this case it is two men -- a nurse named Benigno (Javier Camara) and a journalist named Marco (Dario Grandinetti) who sit next to one another at a ballet performance and then meet once again under circumstances much less agreeable. It is in those first minutes of the film, in the dewy eyes and tear-stained faces of men at a ballet performance of bony women telling a tragic story, that Almodovar sets the tone for this tale.
There is the temptation to chronicle the small, rich details that so deliciously and deliberately invite the eyes, ears, and heart to feast on the unraveling of the story. It is the subtlety of rich, sometimes dark minutiae that rivet the viewer to so well constructed and clever a film about two damaged men in love with two damaged women -- Benigno with a ballerina, Marco with a bullfighter. The men are lovesick, the women in comas from accidents.
With a few masterfully subdued lulls in a story reined in tight to the heart, Almodovar allows for a moment of comprehension of the drama of two powerful love stories galloping alongside each other. But just when you've got a handle on the plot line, anecdotal flashbacks about the lives of the women or Benigno and Marco spiral the story wildly out of control once again, sometimes with beauty and deep meaning, sometimes with absurdity.
Assigned to the care of the comatose dancer Alicia (Leonor Watling), for whom he has carried a voyeuristic crush from afar for years, Benigno, a slightly effeminate virgin, intimately ministers to her with baths, emollients and lotions, massage, and constant conversation about the world beyond the hospital room. He puts little grosgrain ribbons in her hair and he talks to her. So does her visiting dance instructor portrayed by Geraldine Chaplin.
Marco, subdued and never effusive, lives with the ache of his Lydia (Rosario Flores) in a coma after being trampled and gored by a bull. The tear-stained heartache Marco revealed early in the film was not authored by Lydia, but by the lover before her. Lydia has made Marco forget, but Marco has not made Lydia forget being dumped by the bullfighting sensation El Niño. When Lydia says to Marco before the bullfight that rendered her lifeless, "We must talk," Marco agrees, thinking they will tell each other that they have moved past the old heartaches. Marco never gets the hang of talking to the lifeless Lydia, though he does acquiesce to a few lessons from Benigno, carting Lydia in sunglasses to the balcony of the hospital room for a little sun in the company of Benigno and Alicia.
The Marco-Lydia story contrasts in its depth and complexity with the implied arrested development of the Benigno-Alicia story. But is that really the case when it is discovered that Alicia is two months pregnant? Once again, the Almodovar advisory goes up to strap in because the story is about to spiral out of control as it is revealed that Benigno raped/took advantage of Alicia. In the case of Marco and Lydia, the dénouement of their tragic attachment unravels in the moment that Marco overhears El Niño in a bedside vigil with the remote Lydia, telling her how much he loved her, telling Marco they had reconciled and she had been meaning to tell Marco.
The rest of the story moves quickly. Lydia dies. Benigno is a jailbird who doesn't know that Alicia lost the child at birth but woke from the coma and can walk again. He suicides, telling Marco in a note that he wishes to join Alicia wherever she is.
The story ends as it began, at a ballet performance, though this one is not based on tragedy. Both Marco and Alicia sit in the audience, near but not together, witnesses to a dance rich and sweet, a dance filled with the promise of love, a ballet that is also a sensuous samba.