So well-oiled is the Hollywood machine, so monomaniacal is its Dr. Evil-esque quest for world domination, that films made outside of the United States tend to be looked at as cute and mildly pathetic, like kittens on their haunches, batting at balls of string they can’t quite reach.
This may not be the best way to approach foreign films, but that we acknowledge them in any way becomes increasingly important as Hollywood continues to cast a larger and darker shadow.
Most cineastes stumbled upon director Pedro Almodóvar with 1988’s “Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown” and delighted in his brazenly un-American treatment of femininity and promiscuity. The Spaniard has since worked towards harnessing his sexual flights of fancy into a more defined mold of tragi-comedy, so to dismiss him as just another cute kitty is missing out on his boundless technical craft as a filmmaker and visual storyteller.
“Talk To Her” opens with a perfect example. A journalist (Darío Grandinetti) and a nurse (Javier Cámara) unwittingly sit beside one another at a bizarre ballet in which a female dancer dangerously flails about the cluttered stage, saved only at the last second by a male dancer moving furniture out of her way.
It’s an appropriate visual metaphor for what will happen in the film. Grandinetti weeps at the performance and continues to wear his heart on his sleeve, especially after his bullfighting girlfriend takes a near-suicidal goring.
This leads to his befriending of Cámara, who is watching over and infatuated with his female coma patient of over four years. Grandinetti and Cámara go out of their way for the women they love much like the male ballet dancer, the former doing more so after Cámara commits an unspeakable act on his patient.
At the center of this story, though, is love (as it is in all of Almodovar’s films). Whereas most of his previous films dealt with the issue from a female perspective, “Talk To Her” takes the male point of view and amazingly finds the two to be very similar.
Yes, the film is filled with cute one-liners and glib social commentary, but Almodóvar is the kind of director whose films can be summed up in one maxim because their stories and character arcs got them there, not because Almodóvar bent them in that trajectory.
Verbal communication is an essential part of love — small talk, awkward pauses, grandiose declarations — but it is always secondary to the actions it provokes and consequences that result. It is this intricacy that Almodóvar fleshes out best in “Talk To Her,” his camera gliding over and examining his actors’ looks of longing and movements filled with desire.
His characters are more vulnerable than most soap-opera starlets and his plotting requires a generous acceptance of coincidence, but such a strong thematic unity belies his cutesy quirks and you can’t help but get swept up in his overwhelming love for humanity — and that’s why “Talk To Her” affirms that Almodovar is one cat with a firm grasp on his ball of string.
Grade–A/B
