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Those who follow closely the trajectory of Spanish director Pedro Almodovar will probably agree that he entered a phase of cinematic maturity with the release of the film The Flower of My Secret (1995), when the strident camp of his earlier work gave way to more sophisticated, subtle and multi-layered works (Live Flesh, 1997, All About My Mother, 1999). With Talk to Her, he reaches a pinnacle, and while the film does not have the same exhilarating effect as, for example, High Heels (1991), it proves that Almodovar has perfected the art of looking for the absurd and making it absolutely plausible. Almodovar probably is the last great European auteur, combining old-school integrity and vision with a post-modern bite.
Talk to Her takes us back to one of Almodovar favourite scenarios, the hospital, which is used as a metaphor for many of his favourite motives: loneliness, soul-baring impromptu meetings and desperation, and the absurd humour that can be wrought out of this combination. During a Pina Bausch performance of Café Muller, Benigno (Javier Camara) notices that Marco (the quintessential Latin new man Dario Grandinetti) is shedding a tear of joyful emotion (which is quite often Almodovar's way of establishing sexual ambiguity, even when there isn't an obvious one and just leaving it there). Jump cut to Benigno working in a hospital where 24 hours a day he looks after Alicia (Leonor Watling), a dancer who's been in a deep coma for four years. One of the things Benigno does for his comatose object of desire is to pursue her favourite cultural activities on her behalf, such as art house cinema and dance shows (hence the reason why he went to see Pina Bausch in the first place) and then 'tell' her what he's seen (hence the title). We also find out that Benigno had been obsessed with her ever since he was unleashed from a homebound existence looking after his ailing mother. Meanwhile, Marco finds love with Lydia (Rosario Flores), a celebrity bullfighter who also goes into a coma after being gored by a bull. That is when their lives cross again, and Benigno remembers Marco from the Pina Bausch performance(for those who ever saw Pausch's Café Muller and Mazurca Fogo, the film will provide an extra ingredient of pleasure).
Here starts the second part of the film, when the lives of the two leading men ironically hinge on the lives of two comatose women, and Benigno's character grows increasingly dense and psychotic as he leads the narrative to an unexpected turn. At this point Almodovar treats the audience to a fantastic narrative experiment: he weaves in a short black and white silent film called Amante Menguante (Shrinking Lover), which takes up about seven minutes of the film and which is used as a distraction for a defining moment in the plot. With this structural interference, Almodovar proves for good that he is a symbolist of the highest order. While it would be a crime to reveal the details, the finale is once again in the hands of Pina Bausch, with a dancer letting out long, deep sighs. It's a cathartic end to a film so rich that it leaves the audience gasping for air and which makes you want to go out and tell your friends about. Just like Benigno does.
Reviewed by Antonio Pasolini
Reader comments about Talk to Her
Ginnie (Email address withheld) writes:
A stunning film that interwove dance, bullfighting, silent movie, the trauma of intimacy, and unexpected hope... takes some time for the theatre to empty after the credits have rolled.
Loved it.
georgina lee (Email address withheld) writes:
A brilliant movie about loneliness and reconciliation, and a reflection on communication between the two sexes. Almodovar's presentation of the intricate relationship among the characters is insightful yet comfortably, real-life like. He has an excellent grasp of pace and succeeded in sketching out the depthness of innocent love of an otherwise pyschotic-protagonist.
barrie gordon (Email address withheld) writes:
A brilliantly seductive film, beautifully shot, with passionate music and a divergent story. Wonderful.
Martin Lundt (Email address withheld) writes:
The music is sublime.
Apart from the physical contact with the coma patients, there is (virtually) no other human touch in this film. And yet it is passionate and sexy.
Tricia (Email address withheld) writes:
Almodavar's film is beautiful and seductive, but the sexual politics are suspect and conservative. The spectator is asked to sympathise with, and share the male characters' point of view and apart from a brief not to feminist sensibilities, the film quite literally sanctions and eroticises men entering women's bodies without their consent - rape. Thanks Pedro.
Mandy Man (mandykayee@hotmail.com) writes:
It make me think about the relationship between peoples in the modern city. We have intimate contacts with our families and lovers, but we don't talk much. Even though we talk, the content is so superficial and won't touch the heart. Communication is mutual for sure, but spiritual communication i smore important. Today, our relationships are so far apart, just like Benigno and Alica, Marco and Lydia, although we are very close, but our spirit are so far far apart.
Nuria Rosado (Email address withheld) writes:
Benigno, whose name says it all, he is not the psycotic rapist some people tend to lable him. The rape, is it in the film? No, may be in your head. Benigno is trying to save Alicia from a come, trying to wake her up. This is a marvellous film that touches all hearts and there is no perversion in it, just a kind of extreme love.
Michelle (Email address withheld) writes:
Almovodar is a genius. His use of colour, silence and music as a powerful method of expression blows me away. Every scene can be analyzed on so many levels - talk to her is so very rich with plots, sub-plots and concepts. I loved it, this movie will stay with me.
p mayer (cygnets@charter.net) writes:
almodovar is the greatest living film maker what atreasure spain has without him and roman polanski we would suffer with formula pictures of no depth as ever the players are real no plastic faces or bodies thank you pedro,
tiffany (Email address withheld) writes:
it's a disgustingly manipulative movie designed to apologize for rapists and convince people that rape is good for women. how convenient for the male writer/director that he writes a story about a woman being raped in a coma and it turns out good for her. hey, it saves her from the coma! how convenient! that people can be manipulated so easily to see this as a "love story" is the most horrific aspect of all of it. just add pretty visuals, get a good cinematographer, write the story with painfully crafted manipulation and all of a sudden everyone is rooting for a rapist. the reality of rape is that victims suffer massive trauma (and this includes when they can remember the event or not, if it's in the case of being drugged or assaulted while unconscious, "body memories" surface later and the psyche still stores the assault and the trauma is still endured). i hope everyone who has praised this movie thinks about how much they are backstabbing every victim of rape, victims who suffer short term or often lifelong post traumatic stress and destruction of their lives from this crime. rape victims are up to 14 times as likely to attempt suicide as non-victims. (all you fans of this film think about *that* for a while.) none of that is revealed in this film, instead the gutless idea that rape could have a positive effect on a victim is presented instead. hello! this director is sick! it's unbelievably gutless to promote this film.
r winshall (modugay@attglobal.net) writes:
A very complex film, mixing many emotions and different life circumstances. Benigno is clearly the center of the film, although we may distance ourselves from his eternal op- timism.
Incidentally, I was floored by the first music piece--the female vocalist who sang an operatic song while the first dancers moved across the stage. Does anyone know what that was?
Ted (Email address withheld) writes:
Tiffany, Nuria Rosado, and Mandy Man (notice one of them disagrees with the others) are all wrong. They don't seem to understand the point of art. I wrote the following for my cinema class:
Any film can have a good guy and a bad guy. These things are obvious, and having characters with clear-cut morals that are either pure good or pure evil is pretty simple to do. If a film aspires to more than just mindless entertainment, its characters will be far more in-depth than that. They will struggle with issues of ethics, and they will all have positive traits as well as negative ones, protagonists and antagonists alike.
Talk to Her, written and directed by Pedro Almodovar, is a film of higher quality than many, and as such it has characters that are never totally in the right or the wrong. The main character, Marco, is the closest to being perfect, but he is less a flawless hero than a positive reflection of Benigno, his close friend. Whatever makes Marco Marco is intensified to a fault in Benigno, yet even he is never bad for lack of good intentions. Benigno is simply too idealistic and perhaps blinded to reality by his delusional obsession.
Marco and Benigno first meet at the movie theater, where they are both deeply moved by an art film. Marco is crying because he is reminded of his former love when he begins to feel anything at all, while Benigno, who is the Marco-gone-too-far, is moved only because he is emulating the object of his desire/obsession, who was always very interested in cinema. Marco falls in love with a bullfighter, Lydia, who he originally admired from a distance and on whom he then wrote an aricle, while Benigno becomes more and more involved in stalking a girl, Alicia, who would always remain at a distance no matter how close he got to her. Benigno is getting more delusional every day, since he, a male nurse, has been taking care of Alicia ever since she fell into a coma 4 years earlier. Benigno is, it seems at first, just as his name would imply: benign. His delusions are sweet and romantic, and he is walking the fine line between love and lunacy while praying for Alicia to awaken.
Lydia and Alicia are, in fact, representative of another way in which the two men mirror each other. Lydia is a bullfighter, yes, but as the poetic editing and camera movement shows, what she does is more of a dance than a battle. Alicia, being a more saturated form of Marco’s girl, is a dedicated ballet dancer. And while Alicia has lived in a coma for years, Lydia takes the more moderate approach and simply gets gored by a bull, putting her in a more abbreviated coma, albeit one that she doesn’t come out of.
Marco’s life up to that point has been relatively sane, although with a few small, everyday issues. Benigno is more interesting; when he was younger his father left him to take care of his mother, who he washed and groomed daily. His dedication is clearly based on more than love for his mother, and the possibility of something oedipal is not out of the question. Benigno never even goes out to leave his mother alone, instead he spends his free time watching Alicia in her dance class across the street. We learn all this when he goes to see a psychiatrist, Alicia’s father, which is itself just another chance to see her. Now, obsessive care for one’s mother and the tendency to shamefully spy on women to whom one is attracted is a little reminiscent of Norman Bates, but the first real sign that Benigno’s obsession might present a danger occurs at his psychiatrist appointment, in Alicia’s father’s home. Benigno sneaks down the hall and into Alicia’s room, where he steals her hairclip as a memento.
At the hospital, Marco and Benigno are reunited by their respective loved ones. They eventually become friends, and Marco accepts Benigno for the stalker that he is, revealing that perhaps Marco’s biggest flaw is his ability to forgive. Meanwhile, he discovers that Lydia had been planning on leaving him for her ex (which is, at least, not as bad as Alicia, who never even cared for Benigno as a friend), and he decides to stop spending so much time at the hospital. He bids his farewell to Benigno and Alicia and is soon far away, discovering himself.
He soons learns that Lydia has died, and calls the hospital to ask about her. In doing so, he discovers that Benigno has been fired. Apparently, while Marco was devoted enough to visit his girlfriend and stay all day, Benigno has taken that sentiment to an extreme, raping his comatose “girlfriend” out of what he feels is pure love. This is alluded to in Benigno’s telling of a silent film he recently saw to Alicia. In the film, which is one of the greatest cinematic clips of any recent film, a man mistreats his wife and then, in order to prove his love to her, tests her scientific formula, inadvertantly shrinking himself. He is away from her for many years, but eventually they are reunited and he, inadequate though his tiny self may be, has sex with her in her sleep, literally devoting his whole self to the task and sacrificing his life in the process. The artificially old-time film exactly mirrors Benigno and Alicia’s relationship when looked at this way.
While Benigno is obviously unstable, his psychiatric problems actually serve to make him more sympathetic; however misguided he may be, who can say that his wasn’t true love? The fact that it wasn’t reciprocated never even occured to him, and someone with such clear psychological illness cannot be expected to understand the consequences of his actions. Once again, Benigno takes Marco’s feelings and runs too far with them: while Marco admits that he developed a crush on a sleeping girl he’s never met, Benigno declares that he wants to marry her.
Marco visits Benigno in jail and never gives up on him. He moves into his appartment, and from there sees Alicia in the dance studio, awakened by giving birth to her stillborn son. Marco decides not to tell Benigno, and in the end Benigno attmempts to put himself into a coma with pills taken from the hospital infirmary, only to go too far one last time, killing himself. Marco is finally able to open up to someone who can’t respond to him, and shares the truth with Benigno’s grave. He later sees Alicia at the movie house, and presumably he becomes better acquainted with her later on, in his rational, moderate way.
This movie is excellent on many levels. The entire thing is a dance, from the dances in the movies at the opening and closing of the film, to the ballet studio, to the bullfight, and even to Benigno’s washing of Alicia. The irony of Lydia’s last words to Marco before she dies (“We need to talk after the fight...you have [been], not me. I need to talk”) is painful, especially in light of Marco’s inability to talk to Lydia when she is in the coma. Benigno and Marco have one of the most beautifully rendered relationships in any movie, and some ambiguity about Benigno’s possible attraction to Marco is the final element to his confused psyche, showing his Tom Ripley-esque homosexuality as a function of an inability to process a deep, intimate connection in any way other than sexual. In the end, the movie is not asking us to root for a rapist, it is simply asking us to try to understand the point of view of everyone, even the people who we hate with a passion. It does what any great work of art does, offering psychological reasons for everyone’s actions and providing a better comprehension of the characters through those. Nobody’s all good or all evil, and because of that, as evil as someone might be, we could still benefit from understanding why they do what they do.
Chula (Email address withheld) writes:
Ted
Thanks, your review is one of the best I have read recently. I have not seen "Talk to Her" and probably would never have considered renting the film however the sensibility with which you approached the film was refreshing and the depth of your analysis, considering sensitive subject matter, is enlightening. Please post more.
Rochelle Cashdan (Email address withheld) writes:
I don't need to repeat Ted's summary of the script. I just want to add that I especially noticed Almodovar's beginning and the end to the film. By opening with the ballet two of his characters are watching and by ending with the comment of a ballet mistress about life, Almodovar surrounds the plot with a reminder of its artifice. What could be better?
Meredith (wilderthan@gmail.com) writes:
I can't describe the horrible, sickening feeling I had toward the end of this film as I realized that the filmmaker was trying to present Benigno's rape of Alicia as an act of love. Women's bodies are continuously invaded in this movie, whether it is Lydia's house being invaded by the phallic object of the snake, Lydia's body being invaded by the ultra-masculine symbol of the bull, Alicia's home being invaded by Benigno when he steals her comb, or, finally, the worst invasion of all, the most horrific, benigno's rape of Alicia, the invasion of her comatose, unconscious body. The choise of name for the character of Benigno is equally troubling; "benign" means "Exhibiting or manifesting kindly feeling in look, gesture, or action; bland, gentle, mild" -- his character is none of these things. His neurotic obsession with a ballet dancer who would otherwise not give him the time of day turns sadistic and disturbed when he is given complete charge over her care. He is anything but "mild" -- he is a rapist. I hope that everyone who has seen this movie can recognize what Almodovar's continual use of the invasion/penetration of women's bodies as a motif here. This is a disturbing movie, deeply disturbing, for any woman subject to watch.
Doug (douglayne@hotmail.com) writes:
I thoroughly agree with the last comment, posted by Meredith. I was sickened by the film. It’s also astounding to me how critically overrated this film was. The critics just want to praise Almovodar like he’s some king of cinematic God. They need to take their heads out of their pretentious asses and realize that “the emperor has no clothes”.
One little addendum I have to Meredith’s comment; it’s not just unpleasant for a woman to watch. I was sickened by moral bankruptcy and misogyny of this movie. I think the character of Benigno is the creepiest I’ve seen in any film, and he is painted to be this tragic hero that we’re supposed to weep for when he dies. And aside from the loathsome message, it’s just a dull, plodding, and totally un-involving film.
Rebecca (Email address withheld) writes:
the movie is sick enough but the reviewers who see it as a grand love story instead of the romanticising of rape disgust me even more than the movie. "innocent love"? "no perversion in it"?
if that is what raping an unconscious woman means to you then you are as sick as almodovar.
George D (Email address withheld) writes:
I actually didn't think that the film required the viewer to form any empathy with Benigno at all actually... Accepting that he was so simple minded, and unable to comprehend his actions - entirely unable to see the perspective of Alicia, didn't undermine the unease that his character causes from the beginning.
The story certainly humanises the rapist, but does not excuse his actions. far from being a tragic "hero" I thought that it was clear from early on he was nothing but tragic.
It's the unwillingness Almodovar has to draw his characters as anything but ambiguous that makes him a masterful director. Again the actions being portrayed are open for interpretation...
And thus I reserve criticism for those who are lulled by Almodovar into feeling far too much empathy for Benigno - it's their interpretation of his actions as love or innocence that deserve condemnation.
jade brown (jodie.brown@broxtowe.ac.uk) writes:
marco raped alicia, he and her dance teacher arranged it so that it would bring her out of her coma. benigo never once admitted it and those who knew him well in the film new he was innocent. marco only help benigo out of guilt. this was way the dance teacher and marco said at the end that they needed to talk
Michael C (mrvandalay2001@yahoo.com) writes:
So many good comments. I believe Ted's commentary was insightful and that the true beauty of Habla con Ella is the ambiguity of it all. It is designed that way to keep one discussing it. Most brazen of such ambiguity is the twist that Jade Brown points out towards the end when it becomes clear that the dance teacher and Marco have met before and that she has something to tell him. Perhaps he was involved.
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