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Hable con ella (2002) Harvey S. Karten
007 is fun and his boorish clone, Vin Diesel, can entertain us just fine. Nothing's wrong with action-adventure pictures if you're looking for pure escape, but if you're a humanist, a person who believes that there's nothing more interesting than mortal people, you want films about relationships. You want to see men relating to men, men relating to women, women connecting with other women, and few directors can match Pedro Almodovar in that arena. While Almodovar's name has become synonymous with "caustic" and "irreverent" (his "Woman on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown" fourteen years ago was considered witty and outrageous and loaded with laughs), his "Talk to Her" is toned-down Almodovar. In a way he's all the better for this because "Talk to Her" is accessible and suitable for a wider audience than the Spanish director may be accustomed to. Not that "Hable con ella" is about normal situations, unless you consider dating comatose women to be your idea of a Saturday night blast. What could have been a theatre-of-the- absurd entertainment in the style of "Oh Dad, Poor Dad, Momma's Hung You in the Closet and I'm Feelin' So Sad" is still theatrical but Almodovar, who continues to write the films he directs, uses the physical situation of the two young women to explore the ways that men can be passionately connected to the opposite sex and how two men who essentially double-date these poor women find common cause. If this sounds like something grotesque, rest assured that it is not: this is Almodovar at his most soulful. If the relationship of Argentinean travel writer Marco (Dario Grandinetti) with a brain-dead bullfighter, Lydia (Rosario Flores) is unusual; and the connection between a male nurse of confused sexuality, Benigno (Javier Camara) and a comatose dancer, Alicia (Leonor Watling) is unlikely; those two associations serve to make us in the audience accept the deep and almost equally improbable bond that develops between the two men. When Marco begins a passionate affiliation with the female matador, imagine his dismay when Lydia is severely gored by a heavy, enraged animal at the start of the opening fight. Likewise, the virginal Benigno, having spied on Alicia in her dancing class just across the street from his Madrid apartment, is shattered when Alicia becomes victim of a near- fatal traffic accident and is hospitalized on the same floor as Lydia. While Marco forms a silent vigil by the bedside of his beloved Lydia, unable to touch her or to communicate in any way, he is instructed by Benigno to "talk to her," which, in three words, is Almodovar's way to telling us quite simply that this is what women want from men. For his part, Benigno not only converses articulately and regularly with his patient, Alicia, but is trusted to wash her and massage her feet, her arms, her neck. "We get on better than most married couples," he relates to his new pal from Argentina (amen to that), but when he suggests to Marco that he wants to marry her in her current vegetative state, Marco warns, "You talk to plants, but you don't marry them!" While "Talk to Her" is accessible, Almodovar does not run us through the story as a straight narrative but interjects flashbacks to show us how each of the two men met these women; how Benigno, pitifully, has had to take care of his ailing mother and has remains bereft of a sexual connection to both men and women, and how Marco, despite his world travels (at one point we see him in Jordan), is overly sensitive and feels the pangs of loneliness as much as the naive nurse. "Talk to Her," then, is about loneliness the crucial motivator that pushes us out into the world intent on forming bonds with others. "Talk to Her" is replete with comic touches, particularly a seven-minute scene of a silent movie about an incredible shrinking man who winds up in an unusual place to spend the rest of his life part of new, moviegoing activities enjoyed by Benigno, who wants to experience whatever Alicia has undergone in order to feel closer to her. That comical piece of cinematography may have ironically precipitated an action by Benigno which nudges the film toward a tragic path. A brooding Dario Grandinetti sets the tone, a charismatic fellow who seems to bear the weight of the world on his shoulders, while Almodovar's reasoner, the dance instructor played by Geraldine Chaplin, pontificates about how the feminine springs from the masculine and how the concrete earth gives rise to the ethereal. Visually, the movie is as stunning as its intricate, heartfelt story, with scenes that vary from the bullring with its audience tensely awaiting the arrival of the next, miserably treated animal to the angst-ridden isolation of the private hospital room in Madrid and a coldly institutional prison in Segovia. Almodovar respects his audience, entertaining us while continuing to impart his prescient views on the human condition.
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