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If there is one movie you have to see, make it Talk To Her
Pedro Almodovar's baroque tale on love is a masterpiece
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Jeet Thayil
Say what you want about Pedro Almodovar. Call him twisted. Call him sick. Call him a maniac. All of those may be true. But to give him credit where it is most deservedly due, call him a master.
And call his latest --- and 14th --- feature Talk To Her what it almost certainly is: a masterpiece.
Talk To Her takes on the most vexed of all cinematic subjects, love. It aims to tell us nothing less than the truth about what men and women really want from one another.
This, according to Almodovar, is what women want: conversation. They want to be talked to.
And this is what men want: oblivion. They want to be swallowed up.
There is something deeply affecting about this movie's best scenes. It opens with a dance production by the iconoclastic German choreographer Pina Bausch. A seemingly blind woman hurtles through a room full of chairs. A man with the saddest face in the world desperately moves them out of her way. Watching this production are two men, Benigno (Javier Camara) and Marco (Dario Grandinetti). Both are deeply moved, Marco to tears.
Soon, the two men find themselves linked in other ways. After a sequential chain of chance and mischance, Benigno, a male nurse, and Marco, a travel writer, end up in the same hospital, both caring for comatose women. That tragic premise becomes unsettlingly comic in Almodovar's sly and ambivalent hands.
Benigno and the woman he cares for, Alicia (Leonor Watling), have a relationship, he says, that is better than most married couples'. But as flashbacks reveal, Benigno's only connection with Alicia is one of obsessive regard. He is at best a stalker, at worst something more sinister.
But it is this sexually ambiguous desperado who gives Marco the words at the movie's core: talk to her, even if you think she cannot hear you. That may be all she wants.
Marco, on the other hand, is the unlikely champion of a female bullfighter Lydia (Rosario Flores). Again, through flashbacks, we discover that Lydia was about to throw Marco over for an old flame. Marco himself has just recovered from a tortuous love affair with a sometime drug user. Solitude, and something more, link the two men. Marco has overactive tear ducts. He is a poet of the solitary life. Thanks to Benigno, he finds himself able to open up parts of himself that had seemed forever closed.
From a melodramatic tragedy about thwarted love, with more twists than a road map, Talk To Her becomes a morality tale about friendship and empathy. Like Marco, the viewer will find himself unable to take a clear moral stand. You will find yourself rooting for a man who has done something clearly despicable. From this upside-down moral universe emerges a perfectly clear idea: there are no absolute principles when it comes to the human heart. To echo [Fyodor] Dostoyevsky: nothing is true therefore everything is permitted.
A silent movie within the movie titled The Shrinking Lover is a set piece that ranks among Almodovar's very best. This is a director who has created more than one baroque master work. The silent movie tells the tale of a man who shrinks to such a small size that he is able to disappear into his lover. To his, and the viewer's, endless delight, he is swallowed up whole.
Almodovar uses music in such a soaring ecstatic manner that it gives the movie an operatic feel. Brazilian tropicalismo maestro Caetano Veloso makes a cameo appearance that swells the film's already full-to-bursting score. Then there are the gorgeous visual sequences, of Lydia trying on her bullfight costume, of a man swimming, of Marco's lover fleeing naked through the African night. These scenes give the movie a sense of grand spectacle.
If there is only one movie you can see this year, make it Talk To Her. It may well be the single most rewarding experience I have had in months. I left the theater thinking about scenes from the film and continued to think about them for days afterwards.
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