Pedro Almodovar centers his new film, “Talk to Her,” on the tribulations of two men in love. The catch is that the objects of their affection are two comatose women never expected to recover. However, not even this will thwart the two men’s affection.
Marco (Dario Grandinetti) is a travel writer. He meets Benigno (Javier Camara), a male nurse, when he brings his famous matador girlfriend Lydia (Rosario Flores) to the hospital after she is gored by a bull. Lydia slips into a coma and hangs perilously on the edge of death,
Benigno says he has been around women his entire life. He takes pride in his abilities. “I took care of my mother for 20 years. [I] bathed her, cut her hair,” he says matter-of-factly. He first saw ballerina Alicia (Leonor Watling) through the window of a dance studio across the street from his second-floor apartment and immediately became infatuated. She fell under his care when she rolled into the hospital one rainy night as a comatose victim of a catastrophic car accident.
Benigno is not just a matter-of-fact type of guy. For the past four years he has tended to the inanimate Alicia as scrupulously as if she were his wife: He takes others nurses’ shifts so he may be with her, tells Alicia stories, bathes her, massages her, cuts her hair and carries a one-sided dialogue with her the whole time. He is in love with her.
The two men who share similar situations begin to share thoughts and become friends. No reviewer should tell you more than this, for at this point a peculiar chain of events takes place, and Almodovar leads his audience into a moral gray zone of confusion and mixed emotion that the movie pulls off exceedingly well. It is sad, dramatic and profoundly satisfying. The themes of love and devotion, among a few others, dominate its metaphorical landscape in a position of sheer akwardness.
Almodovar advances his story with quirky imagination and skill. The most curious scene of the film, an audacious black-and-white fastasy short about a tiny man determined to show his affection for a woman, will invoke startled, confused laughter among audience members not quite like anything else this year.
Almodovar’s creativity with the medium is peculiar yet sweet, and he is perhaps the most important filmmaker to emerge from Spain since surrealist Luis Buñuel’s death in 1983. He already has an Academy Award for his 1999 film “All About My Mother,” and this year “Talk to Her” is nominated for Best Screenplay while Almodovar is nominated for Best Director. He may lose, as he is perhaps not the best of the nominees. However, his skill as a director and writer shows him to be a Spanish amateur simply exercising his incredible potential.