Talk To Her (Hable con ella) - Pedro Almodovar

The “dashing, charismatic buccaneering” (as I have called him elsewhere) Spanish storyteller, Pedro Almodovar, is back. And this time he packs more punch with his dynamic panache in another vignette comprising of an array of relationships, milieus and emotions.

Almodovar crafts the yarn with a dash of his creative verve, a tale about four people - two friends, and the two objects of their affections, both comatose and unaware of their lovers’ service of them. Talk to Her (Hable con ella) focuses on men and their minutiae and captures the development of a heart rending friendship between them, while they grapple with their emotional upheavals, loneliness and yearning, swinging back and forth in time. The film also luminously details the underlying sensitive nuances that lurk within men, the power of an unusual and solid love, incorporating a multitude of magic all the way and eventually reinforcing and eternalizing the brilliance of its creator.

Benigno (Javier Camara) and Marco (Dario Grandinetti) are locked into an emotional friendship as they selflessly cater to the women they love who are both in a vegetative state due to unfortunate accidents. Benigno who is almost monastic in living and fixatedly in love with beautiful ballet dancer Alicia (Leonar Watling), spends his life nursing and caring for her. He massages her body with tender love and obsession, taking up her passions as his own - going to the ballet, watching eclectic films – and living his life as she would. And he talks to her - his life a touching monologue with the woman he loves.

On the other hand, Marco, a stolid and reticent travel journalist, meets Benigno in the same hospital when his girlfriend Lydia, a celebrity bull fighter (Geraldine Chaplin) gets injured and slips into coma after a bullfight. A bond of subterranean friendship develops between the two, as Marco’s helpless hebetude over his girlfriend’s stupor is interrupted by Benigno’s peculiar but emotive advice, when he asks Marco to Talk to Her.

The film further, is a falling apart of Marco and Lydia’s still relationship, and a possible foggy fragment to Benigno’s otherwise gentle, unusual and spotless love for Alicia (which is misconstrued as psychopathic and rapine in nature to those oblivious of his emotions) . What ensues is strangely disturbing and unexpected, but the movie culminates as a picture bigger than all its parts. Even the parts are complete in themselves in manifold ways and only reveal themselves to the most fastidious of the viewers, not to be categorized as unthinkable or predictable, ethical or unethical, happy or sad.

Almodovar’s always affixed mysteries and surprises could be left to figure for one self but the most appealing aspect is not what’s to come, but how the film progresses (yet I shall abstain to reveal them). The director whittles out a heart wrenching way to wrap up the film, in excruciating radiance and beauty- emphasizing on the notion of the female emerging from the male, as the ethereal emerges from the earthly. The film is inundated with sequences that will stun you - the short silent film, “Shrinking Lover”, created by this ingenious film-maker and set running as a part of the film for seven minutes is naked, imaginative and spectacular. While Benigno is full of suppleness and is yet more volatile in an unsettling way, Marco’s surface stiffness, softens only to let out a tear when watching those beautiful theater performances that the film both begins and ends with, those that are cut out by Almodovar so very exquisitely.

The two women, though inert for most part, are sole stimulation to the plot and to the men. Benigno is the supine soul of the film- offering no resistance, and living his life to its end for only one divine purpose which is love; while Marco, more real and sturdy becomes our reflection-we think through his mind and see in him the trenchant sentimentalities we feel in ourselves while watching Benigno and the film.

If Pedro Almodovar is one of the most miraculous filmmakers known to world cinema, it is because he knows how to have his films talk to us- Talk to Her speaks volumes about the tenderness of relationships, the strange essence in the friendship of men, the soreness of solitude, and the fullness of love - and all so splendidly, without saying too much.

Take a look at the opening scene of the film: