Talk To Her

by Shari L. Rosenblum

Talk To Her, the new film by Pedro Almodóvar, is a haunting exploration of loneliness and need played side by side with an almost artless exposition on film art - and both sides of the story are lovingly limned. Narrative without image, image without narrative, men raised in the feminine mystique, and women trained in the masculine, come together in a study of contrasts where stasis illuminates movement, silence impacts sound, and black and white provide the inner color. And nowhere can be felt the heavy hand of directorial intrusion or the weight of pseudointellectual pretense.

Beginning where the director's last film ended, Talk To Her opens with a curtain rising. On the stage, two women in the flimsiest of garments dance, one as if in imitation of the other, in agony, in sorrow, around obstacles, into walls, back and forth in a wordless limbo, while a single man tries to clear the path before them. (The dance is Pina Bausch's Café Müller, a poster of which can be spied in passing in All About My Mother, Almodóvar's previous work). In the audience, two men are watching. One is crying, the other moved by his sympathy. They are our protagonists: Marco (Dario Grandinetti), a freelance writer, and Benigno (Javier Cámara of Sex and Lucia), a long-term care nurse who engages his single patient with storytelling.

The two men will be brought together again, and for the rest of the film, in the watching of two other women: Lydia (Rosario Flores), a torrera Marco first sees on the tv screen, and Alicia (Leonor Watling), a dancer Benigno spies rehearsing in the studio across the way: each of whom lies, at some point in the film, in a comatose state. Wholly physical beings rendered immobile, discipline and fluidity fixed in time and space: the female as spectacle in all its permutations - objet d'art as objet d'amour, pursued and perceived by the male as narrator. Lydia is a setpiece dressing for the bullfight, stockings to cap, breathtakingly still as each button on the gold-braided bolero is buttoned. Alicia, is a setpiece undressed, vulnerable in her naked beauty. But there is no malice or misogyny in this; the narration circles back naturally, effortlessly, to l'éternel féminin - as a means of connection, engagement, commitment to the unknown or unknowable female mind (the theory is made explicit, even in the film's title) -- and reverts again to wordless image in a silent film centerpiece story-within-a-story with a surrealistic ending that cockily defies the myth of vagina dentata. If male sexuality is concretized here, it is partly in tears, partly in seminal fluid, each coming from the unlikelier source, and each ultimately abortive in its creative possibilities. Or perhaps it is in bulls (which Lydia fights) and snakes (which she fears) - a contradiction humorous in its contrariness, and symbolic in ways the film does not carry through.

The apparent iconography notwithstanding, gender is not a constructed truth in any Almodóvar film, and even with the absence of cross-dressing and flamboyance, in Talk To Her, as in all of Almodóvar's works, sexuality defines without confining its characters. Homoeroticism is not necessarily homosexuality, and men like Marco and Benigno can bond in tenderness, soft without sublimation.

The story that unfolds in Talk To Her nonetheless is to great extent no more than soap opera, predictable in the way soap operas are, despite its quirks and twists and turns. It is high melodrama, tinged with dark wit and sly humor. Marco is crushed after a broken romance with an underaged heroin addict, Lydia is assaulted by a tenacious talk show host after being dumped by a glamourous bullfighter boyfriend, Benigno is cloistered for twenty years with a mother on whom he must wait hand and foot, and Alicia is a motherless daughter with a maternal-substitute dance teacher (Geraldine Chaplin). A rumor has missionaries raping nuns, while a doctor teaches science, but preaches faith. Each of the characters is imprisoned in expectations, contorted by loves and dreams, constrained by life itself and then liberated in companionship, or in death. The thread of comfort is woven through the film's darkest, even cruelest moments.

In the end, as in the beginning, there is a dance upon the stage - a performance that begins with a sigh, a sadness left over from the opening, perhaps, or resulting from the film's unfolding (again, Pina Bausch, this time the dance is "Masurca Fogo"), but ends with hope.

©2002 Shari L. Rosenblum
CineScene