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REVIEW: The Postmodern Melodrama of Almodovar's "Talk to Her" Peter Brunette
At the end of the opening credits of Pedro Almodovar's new film, "Talk to Her" (Hable con ella), a stage curtain rises and we are ushered into that marvelously artificial cinematic realm that his fans have come to know and unreservedly love. On this special planet, melodramatic excess transcends any possible real world, and emotion trumps reason, every time. In short, the Spanish director is working much the same territory of his earlier triumph, "All About My Mother," but this time his goals are much more ambitious. Alas, this isn't necessarily a good thing, for the grander the scope, the greater the possibility for error. Like comedy, the effectiveness of melodrama lies largely in the eye of the beholder, and not everyone will be charmed by this latest effort. While "All About My Mother" reveled self-consciously in the world of women -- virtually the only men in evidence were a gaga oldster and some transgendered former males -- "Talk to Her" focuses resolutely on two decidedly different men, Benigno (Javier Camara), a virginal twenty-something nurse who has spent 15 years tending his lazy (and then dying) mother, and Marco (Darío Grandinetti), a fortyish displaced Argentinian writer of travel guides. Though Benigno has covertly witnessed Marco crying during the performance of a Pina Bausch dance composition, the two men first formally meet in a hospital, where both are tending women they love who are in deeply comatose states. Benigno's adored Alicia (Leonor Watling) is a young, highly promising dancer who was struck by a car one awful, rainy day, and Marco's lover, the older Lydia (Rosario Flores), is a bullfighter who's been fearfully gored. True to its soap opera aesthetic, the film's plot is so relentlessly baroque that it would take the rest of the review merely to outline its most prominent features, so let's not even try. One wonderful thing about soap opera is that-since all is permitted -- you never know what's going to happen next, and this bracing unpredictability keeps "Talk to Her" consistently interesting and entertaining. Ridiculous jokes abound, such as when it is revealed that the fearless lady bullfighter is deathly afraid of snakes. There is also a lot more "technique" in this film than in his previous film (slow-motion, the extreme attention paid to detail as the bullfighter dons her "suit of lights," etc.), and this too seems to make it new. At one point, Benigno recounts to the stricken Alicia the plot of a silent film he's just seen (which we see as he recounts it), and this film-within-the-film, whose highlight is a man shrunken to a few inches hilariously crawling into his girlfriend's vagina, is perhaps the high point of "Talk to Her." But Almodovar's greatest natural talent may be his ability to master a dizzying variety of tones within a single film. Thus, as the postmodernist he is, he can miraculously, and shamelessly, pull out all the emotional stops, and yet make fun of this very surfeit of melodrama at the same time. In the first half of "Talk to Her," the director walks this tightrope flawlessly, but then seems to decide in the second half to play it completely straight -- that is, as straight, flat-out melodrama -- and not every viewer will want, or be able, to accompany him on this sentimental journey. The film takes up a bevy of serious themes that in another context would be called philosophical: the relationship of science (which says, for example, that a brain-dead patient will never recover from her coma) to faith (which says that anything is possible); coma as a weird, mixed state between life and death, which calls both into question; and "appropriate" gender behavior as something unfixed and variable. And what does it mean to speak of a person in the third person, in her unconscious presence, and to touch and massage the erogenous areas of her body? What does this do to her putative humanity? "Talk to Her," which is the advice Benigno gives to a skeptical Marco regarding his lost Lydia, is also at times probingly self-reflexive as it points to, and reveals, the always artificial process behind all forms of representation. (Almodovar seems to take special delight in the utter artificiality of the hospital sets.) Unlike most directors, this one doesn't fake reality; instead, he realizes fakery, and says that it's finally just as important as doing it the other way around. In order to carry out this double, self-aware game, actors of the highest order are necessary, and Almodovar has always been blessed in this regard. Even when you're watching his two male leads, Camara and Grandinetti, fully indulge emotions that you're not sharing, you recognize their talent and the amazing combination of intellectualism and intuition that can take them to these stranges places without becoming embarrassed. Ultimately, though, there's so much here that the viewers may become overwhelmed by all the pretty, fascinating balls in the air. So much so that they may forget to care, which isn't, of course, what Almodovar had in mind at all.
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