Other Titles • Talk to Her (2002) • Hable con ella • Sprich mit ihr (2002)
Synopses for Talk to Her (2002)
1.
The curtain before the stage, decorated with salmon colored roses and golden tassels, opens to present a Pina Bausch dance spectacle, "Café Müller". Among the spectators, two men are sitting together by chance, they don't know each other. They are Benigno, a young nurse, and Marco, a forty-something writer. On the stage, filled with wooden chairs and tables, two women, their eyes closed and their arms stretched, are moving to the compasses of "The Fairy Queen" by Henry Purcell. The piece provokes such emotion that Marco breaks into tears. Benigno notices the shining tears of his casual companion in the darkness of the theatre's audience. He would like to tell him that he too is moved by the performance, but he doesn't dare.
Months later, the two men meet again at "El Bosque", a private clinic where Benigno works. Lydia, Marco's girlfriend, a bullfighter by profession, has been gored by a bull and has fallen into a coma. Benigno in fact is in charge of another woman in a coma, Alicia, a young ballet student.
When Marco passes by Alicia's room, Benigno approaches him. It is the beginning of an intense friendship, as linear as a roller coaster.
During the time suspended within the walls of the clinic, the life of these four characters flows in all directions, past, present and future, leading all of them to an unexpected destiny.
TALK TO HER is a story about the friendship of two men, about loneliness and the long convalescence of the wounds provoked by passion. It is also a film about incommunication among couples, and about communication. About film as a subject of conversation. About how monologues before a silent person can become an effective form of dialogue. About silence as "eloquence of the body", about film as an ideal vehicle/language in relationships between people, about how a film told in words can stop time and install itself in the lives of those who tell it and those who hear it.
Writer-director Pedro Almodóvar makes another masterpiece with Talk to Her, his first film since the wonderful All About My Mother. Marco (Dario Grandinetti) is in love with Lydia (Rosario Flores), a female bullfighter who is gored by a bull and sent into a coma. In the hospital, Marco crosses paths with Benigno (Javier Camara), a male nurse who looks after another coma patient, a young dancer named Alicia (Leonor Watling). From Benigno's gentle attentiveness to Alicia, Marco learns to take care of Lydia... but from there, the story goes in directions that deftly manage to be sad, hopeful, funny, and creepy, sometimes at the same time. The rich human empathy of Almodóvar's recent films is passionate, heartbreaking, intoxicating--there aren't enough adjectives to praise this remarkable filmmaker, who is at the height of his powers. Talk to Her is superb, with outstanding performances from all involved. --Bret Fetzer
(24 votes)
3.
Two men almost meet while watching a dance performance, but their lives are irrevocably entwined by fate. They meet later at a private clinic where Benigno is the caregiver for Alicia, a beautiful dance student who lies in a coma. Marco is there to visit his girlfriend Lydia, a famous matador also rendered motionless. As the men wage vigil over the women they love, the story unfolds in flashback and flashforward as the lives of the four are further entwined and their relationships move toward a surprising conclusion.
(22 votes)
4.
Spanish director Pedro Almodovar's Talk To Her is his least stylised, most accessible and arguably greatest movie. Covering the same, highly provocative terrain as Dennis Potter's Brimstone and Treacle and The Smiths' "Girlfriend in a Coma", Almodovar forges a work that's funny, compassionate, engaging and deeply touching.
Unusually for Almodovar, the emphasis is on the two male characters, with the female leads spending much of the film as "objects" in a vegetative state. Dario Grandinetti plays Marco, a journalist who befriends Lydia (Rosario Flores), a female bullfighter. Following a goring in the ring, she lapses into a coma. At the clinic where she is kept on life support, Marco meets a somewhat effete male nurse, Benigno (Javier Camara) who lovingly tends to a ballet student, Alicia, also chronically comatose. They strike up a friendship, their respective stories emerging through flashbacks. Both, however, respond to their common fate in different ways. Marco is distraught at the loss of Lydia, whereas the dysfunctional Benigno is blissful, tending to Alicia, for whom he nourished an obsession prior to accident. Reduced to being a vegetable, she is fully, unresistingly, his.
It's a tribute to Almodovar that he is able to handle the outlandish, potentially appalling subject matter of Talk To Her with such finesse. Emotionally, it's often on a knife edge; there are moments when you don't know whether to laugh, gasp or sigh. But when ultimately you find yourself welling with tears of sympathy for an alleged rapist, you realise what a master filmmaker Almodovar is.
On the DVD:Talk To Her offers an excellent transfer of a visually handsome movie. Extras are a little disappointing--just trailers for Almodovar's more outlandish Live Flesh and All About My Mother. --David Stubbs
(22 votes)
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