Talk to Her (2002) | Review

Almodóvar delivers another great visual painting.

Pedro Almodóvar’s newest bullfighter red oeuvre in the Spanish language mustn’t be compared to his last piece All About My Mother, for this is not a masterpiece, but a delightful follow-up to the international success. Talk to Her is the type of off kilter picture that will delight audiences.

The story revolves around Marco, (Darío Grandinetti) the writer of travel guides and Benigno (Javier Cámara) a private nurse who are co-joined together by a suggestive dance performance that leaves Marco in his usual tears and sends Benigno off with a long lasting image of the ‘man who cries’. By freak occurrence, the two strangers will later reunite in a hospital room for a patient in comatose. With a go back three spaces and advance by two type of leaping back and forth narrative the film is unveiled with back stories that explain more about the reasoning behind the character’s emotional state. The narrative explores their attraction for the muted women that they fall in love with, and then elaborates on their individual loneliness and obsessive-ness. Even though there is no response, Benigno’s therapeutic principles of talking to his ballerina belle linked to his obsession of her will eventually become his pitfall.

Almodóvar likes to shock us and to shake the viewer up, with a couple of American television soap opera twists he’ll make a given story seem perfectly normal, and then he’ll pull the rug from right underneath us by literally pouncing on his characters and explore their range of emotions and especially their vulnerabilities. With the traditional use of close-up shots to capture either the grief or joy or in the case of this film the pure silent beauty found in the image of la Madonna, Almodóvar likens to stories that jitter and to ideas that are truthful. He takes great pride in his characters and he never mocks them even in their moments of suffering from their obsessions and their bouts of loneliness. The mock silent film of the “Shrinking Lover” that foreshadows Benigno’s predicament substantiates Almodóvar as a great story teller whose visual language demonstrates how colors and cinematography affect the emotional tone of the picture. Talk to Her is the kind of film that will touch you in the most untraditional of ways, with its lucid narratives, urban poetry and the Almodóvar touch for banality.

I think that this film will certainly strike a cord of familiarity for his fans with his easily traceable filmic themes and auteur driven filmmaking style and it certainly is a delight just by its pure realistic portrayals of complicated figures and by the shapes, the colors and the sounds that perforate the screen. Talk to Her is among his best features and places him among the most talented artists of our time.

Viewed in Spanish with English Subtitles

Rating 4 stars