Men on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown

Film Review
Title: Hable con Ella (Talk to Her, 2002)
Director: Pedro Almodovar

Hable con Ella (Talk to Her, 2002) is a movie that only Pedro Almodovar can make and get away with. The enfant terrible of Spanish cinema, Almodovar is known for his dark humor and for making films that deal with the complexities of being a woman (Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, Tie Me Up Tie Me Down, All About My Mother, Volver, etc.). But on this rare occasion, Almodovar shifts his focus on the men but still in the most intricate and unexpected way. With its engaging story, superb characterization, rich cinematography, and wonderful use of music, Talk to Her may very well be Almodovar’s masterpiece.

The film opens with an intriguing dance concert, a rendition of Pina Bausch’s Café Müller. Two women dance on a stage filled with scattered chairs while a male dancer helplessly tries to clear the chairs for them. In the audience we see our two main characters sitting beside each other – Marco (Dario Grandinetti) and Benigno (Javier Cámara). Benigno notices Marco being moved to tears with the dancers’ performance. They do not know each other yet, but soon their lives will be intertwined.

On the surface the characters of the two men might seem typical, but there is more to them than meets the eye. Marco is a rugged yet handsome travel writer whose thoughts are still with his former girlfriend. Everything around him seems to remind him of her and this makes him prone to shedding tears every now and then. On the other hand, Benigno is an extremely shy and soft-spoken male nurse who never had a girlfriend. He spent all his life looking after his mother until the day she died. All of his co-workers in the hospital quickly assume that he is gay.

Marco then meets Lydia (Rosario Flores), a female bullfighter. The two fall in love even though Lydia is still recovering from a recent break-up with her boyfriend, a famous bullfighter like herself. In one bullfighting event, Lydia is seriously injured by a bull which renders her in a coma. In the hospital, Marco crosses paths once again with Benigno who is looking after another coma patient, Alicia (Leonor Watling). Alicia is a young and beautiful ballet student who is hit by a car four years earlier and has been in a coma ever since. With Marco’s frequent visits to the hospital, he and Benigno quickly become friends. Marco is fascinated with the way Benigno takes care of Alicia, the way he talks to her, bathes her, washes her hair, cuts her nails, and massages her whole body.

Through a series of flashbacks, we learn of the stories surrounding the two men. On the day of Lydia’s accident, Marco tells Lydia that he is ready to let go of his past only to find out later on that Lydia and her former lover have gotten back together. Benigno on the other hand has been obsessed with Alicia even before she was admitted to the hospital, having watched her everyday as she attends her ballet class. On the night before Marco leaves for a travel assignment, Benigno confides to Marco that he is in love with Alicia and plans to marry her. Things get complicated when the doctors discover that Alicia is pregnant and their main suspect is Benigno. The friendship of the two will be put to the test as Marco returns home to help his friend, bringing the film to its shattering climax.

Known as a woman’s director, Almodovar nevertheless proves that he can also direct men exceptionally well. In this film the men take center stage, but Almodovar paints an entirely different portrait of them. On the inside both men are effeminate, yet both find it hard to relate to women. Marco is emotionally cold and distant yet he often cries. Benigno is so shy that he falls in love with a woman who cannot physically and mentally love him in return. Clearly, these are not the very virile and macho type of men we are so used to seeing in local or even Hollywood movies. In effect, Almodovar is saying that our traditional notion of the male, and even the female, gender has changed in these modern times.

Ever the dark humorist, Almodovar displays his brilliance when Benigno tells the comatose Alicia of a silent film he recently saw, comically titled The Shrinking Lover. It is the story of a woman who invents a diet potion for her obese lover. The man drinks the yet-untested potion reducing his entire body size to that of a matchstick. On the night that they sleep together, the man enters her lover’s vagina while she’s sleeping and stays inside her forever. This utterly Freudian sequence, shot by Almodovar in black-and-white, is actually a front for what is really happening. It was on this night that Benigno raped Alicia while he is telling her the story of The Shrinking Lover.

Javier Aguirresarobe’s cinematography captures the beauty and surprising gracefulness of bullfighting. Through a series of close-ups of Lydia as she prepares for a bullfight, we see the details and the richness of the costume. In a slow motion sequence of Lydia challenging the bull, it is as if we are watching a ballet performance rather than a bullfight.

Almodovar also uses music in a masterful way, carefully choosing the songs that will comment, albeit in a very subtle way, on what the men are going through. In one moving scene, Marco and Lydia attend a concert where the band performs a very touching rendition of the Spanish song “Cucurucuccu Paloma”. As Marco hears the song, he begins to cry and walks away. The lyrics go, “How he suffered for her. Even on his deathbed he was calling for her. Oh how he sang, oh how he sighed. He was dying of mortal passion…” In Almodovar’s world, the men are what they are precisely because of their mortal passions.

Talk to Her swept almost all the major European awards the year it was released. It was also honored with two Oscar nominations – Best Screenplay and Best Director for Almodovar. What a fitting tribute to one of cinema’s most unique and thought-provoking artist.