Benigno: Javier Camara
Marco: Dario Grandinetti
Alicia: Leonor Watling
Lydia: Rosario Flores
Katerina: Geraldine Chaplin
15 March 2003
by Jasmine Park
Given how much I like Pedro Almodovar's latest film, Talk to Her (Hable con ella), I have recently become worried about its fate with the general movie-going public since critic after critic has praised it to high heaven. Make no mistake about it: this movie will not change your life; make you see human relationships in a totally new way; or make you question your deepest notions of right and wrong. This film is not epic in any regard - it tells an intimate story about four people, and when it's done and the credits roll, you are left feeling charmed and just slightly at a loss for words. But its intelligence should not be mistaken for intellectual profundity.
With that said, Almodovar takes the prototypical European touchy-feely people-and-relationships movie trope and does it better than any director in recent years; more than any contemporary moviemaker, he knows how to instill joy in his films. The colorful sexiness of his previous films, including the delightful All About My Mother (1999), has been toned down and replaced by subtlety; what moves you about Talk to Her is more inexplicable, and somehow realer, than any of his other work.
The story involves two men and two women who appear to be strangers to each other in the beginning, but who will have various connections with one another through the course of the film. Marco (Dario Grandinetti) is a travel writer who glimpses a television interview of a famous female bullfighter, Lydia (Rosario Flores), and becomes determined to meet her. Benigno (Javier Camara) is a male nurse whose sole patient is Alicia (Leonor Watling), a comatose ballerina. Marco and Lydia eventually become lovers, but when she is gored by a bull in the ring and goes into a coma, she becomes a patient in the same hospital where Benigno cares for Alicia.
In time, as they each tend to their women, Benigno and Marco become friends. But Marco soon finds himself at a loss to care for Lydia with the same tenderness and patience that Benigno shows for Alicia. Only when Lydia has fallen silent does Marco realize how little he really knew of her; and eventually he finds out how much more Lydia left unsaid to him.
Marco will also come to realize, as we will, that Benigno's outward appearance of generosity and sweetness is not all it seems, and that his role as Alicia's main caretaker at the hospital is not entirely coincidental. The story relies on several flashbacks to explain the motivations of both Benigno and Lydia - how Benigno came to know Alicia before her accident, and why Lydia might have chosen to die in the ring.
One of the film's many qualities that make it distinctly and admirably un-Hollywood is the initial nondescript impressions the lead actors make, with the exception of Watling, who is the only obviously good-looking lead (she bears a striking resemblance to a young Natalie Wood); as the object of both Benigno's and Marco's fascination, she is the only character required to be beautiful. Grandinetti, Flores, and Camara are unknown to American audiences; thus, when they eventually earn our sympathy, it possesses the unique quality of feeling deserved. So many Hollywood films today presume our sympathy simply because we register with the actors who star in them; they never have to work to earn our pity or compassion. How refreshing it is to experience a film that, through its story, its gestures, and even its characters' moments of weakness, becomes familiar and endearing to us.
Of course, because it is an Almodovar film, Talk to Her has its moments of quirkiness, including a black-and-white silent film whose ridiculousness is tempered by a strangely touching finale that exemplifies Almodovar's unique ability to turn camp into something that moves us. He also treats us to a dream sequence that floats in the film like some moment of achingly perfect nostalgia. In an article for the New York Times, composer Osvaldo Golijov wrote about this scene and its performance by Brazilian singer Caetano Veloso: "Caetano's angelic falsetto offers a time-stopping blessing and love lesson that sounds as if imparted by a 211-year-old Papageno, now wise, wistful and infinitely generous." The performance by Veloso, and the expressions of joy and peacefulness on the faces of the various people in the audience, embodies the film's unique, inexplicable sincerity.
Sony Pictures Classics presents a film written and directed by Pedro Almodovar. Running time: 112 minutes. In Spanish with English subtitles. Rated R (for nudity, sexual content and some language).
Javier Camara as Benigno and Leonore Watling
as Alicia in Talk to Her.
Rosario Flores as Lydia.
Dario Grandinetti as Marco and Geraldine Chaplin
as Katerina.
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