Talk to Her Review
By Joe Lozito
Girlfriend in a Coma
Benigno (Javier Cámara), a slight man as harmless as his name implies, spent his adult life tending to his mother. "She was not disabled, just lazy," he informs his psychiatrist. Of course, the only reason he's seeing a psychiatrist is to get closer to his daughter, the beautiful dancer Alicia (Leonor Watling), whom Benigno has admired from his mother's window. As fate and contrivance would have it, Alicia is struck by a car and falls into a coma. Benigno, being a trained nurse, becomes her nearly 24-hour caretaker. He bathes her, cuts her hair, dresses her and, above all else, talks to her. He feels completely that he and Alicia have a relationship as deep and devoted most "normal" couples. Surely, his love for Alicia is complete, but what of Alicia's feelings, if she even has them?
In "Talk to Her", writer-director Pedro Almodóvar uses this premise as a means of exploring love as both a selfless and selfish act. Mr. Almodóvar has a gift for understanding how love affects his characters. This time however, unlike "All About My Mother", he creates a less flamboyant cast: a reporter, a male nurse, a dancer and a female matador. How Mr. Almodóvar ties these four lives together is part of the charm of the film. His script jumps back and forth through time, but not in the showy Tarantino way that has become a custom in American films. Instead, you feel like you're listening to a great storyteller who feeds you the details you need as you need them. The story he tells gets more and more engrossing as it goes on and, while some of the elements may be familiar, they are never predictable.
Mr. Almodóvar creates a relationship between his two male leads as compelling - if not more so - than the male-female couples. Of course, this being a Spanish film, the characters fall in love quickly but, this being a Pedro Almodóvar film, also believably. There are moments of classic soap opera melodrama here, but also moments of great tragedy and comedy. In an overly cutesy running gag, Mr. Almodóvar superimposes the character's names over the film when they first fall in love - it's the cinematic equivalent of singing the "…sittin' in a tree K-I-S-S-I-N-G" song, which may be the feeling Mr. Almodóvar was trying to convey in the first place. Message received.
