Hable con ella (2002) - film review

Marco and Benigno are two men who, despite their very different backgrounds, are bound to share a common destiny.  Marco is a travel writer who is still traumatised by the break-up with his girlfriend.   He becomes fascinated by the bullfighter Lydia González and resolves to meet her.  They fall in love but, a few months later, Lydia suffers a near-fatal injury in the bullring and ends up in a coma.  At the clinic where Lydia is being treated, Marco meets Benigno, a male nurse whose only true love, Alicia, is also in a coma.   Benigno explains that he fell in love with Alicia when she was a dancer but before he could begin any kind of relationship with her, she was hit by a car and put into a comatose state from which she has yet to recover.  Benigno has spent the last four years lovingly caring for Alicia and suggests that Marco should do the same for Lydia...

Pedro Almodóvar’s follow-up to his highly successful, Oscar winning All About My Mother is this off-beat but equally arresting portrayal of two men who develop a singular kind of friendship through their shared experiences.   In some ways, it is an atypical Almodóvar – an introspective low-key drama in which the central characters are not hypoactive and over-talkative women but two introverted men who have to live with the fact that the women they love will never talk again.  It is a film which offers a purely male-oriented view of romantic love, something that is surprisingly rare in cinema, even today.  

Less flamboyant and stylised than much of Almodóvar’s previous work, Talk to her has an intimacy and sharp narrative focus that makes it particularly poignant and stimulating.  It explores the nature of love and friendship through the experiences of two men – superbly portrayed by Javier Cámara and Darío Grandinetti – who form a close bond (which veers towards the homoerotic) through the women they have lost.   In both its subject and its approach, the film shows Almodóvar gravitating towards a more mature and sophisticated kind of cinema, where the artistic excesses of his early years are pared back and far greater attention is given to dramatic substance - whilst retaining that subversive charm that audiences and critics have come to love and expect of the man who is now widely regarded as the world’s greatest living filmmaker.

© James Travers 2009

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