Talk to Her (Hable con ella)

Director Pedro Almodóvar
Spain 2002
112 minutes

Oscar winner for Best Writing, Screenplay Written Directly for the Screen and BAFTA for Best Film not in the English Language

After a chance encounter at a theatre, two men, Benigno and Marco, meet at a private clinic where Benigno works. Lydia, Marco's girlfriend and a bullfighter by profession, has been gored and is in a coma. It so happens that Benigno is looking after another woman in a coma, Alicia, a young ballet student. The lives of the four characters will flow in all directions, past, present and future, dragging all of them towards an unsuspected destiny.

Our notes

Talk to Her is a film with many themes; it ranges in tone from a soap opera to a tragedy. One theme is that men can possess attributes usually described as feminine. They can devote their lives to a patient in a coma, they can live their emotional lives through someone else, they can gain deep satisfaction from bathing, tending, cleaning up, taking care. The bond that eventually unites the two men in Talk to Her is that they share these traits. For much of the film what they have in common is that they wait by the bedsides of women who have suffered brain damage and are never expected to recover.

Marco meets Lydia when she is at the height of her fame; the most famous female matador in Spain. Driving her home one night he learns her secret. She is fearless about bulls, but terrified of snakes. After Marco catches a snake in her kitchen she announces she will never be able to go back into that house again. Soon after this she is gored by a bull, and lingers in the twilight of a coma. Marco, who did not know her very well, paradoxically comes to know her better as he attends at her bedside.

Benigno has long been a nurse, and for years tended his dying mother. He first saw the ballerina Alicia (Leonor Watling) as she rehearsed in a studio across from his apartment. She is comatose after a traffic accident. He volunteers to take extra shifts and seems willing to spend 24 hours a day at her bedside. He is in love with her.

There are plenty of films available about women talking to one another but films that chronicle deep, meaningful conversations between men are a rarity. Talk to Her is one of these unusual films, with Benigno and Marco developing a powerful bond as a result of their common circumstances. They speak to their comatose women but, with increasingly greater frequency, they begin to rely upon one another. There may be an element of homoeroticism here, at least on Benigno's part. He is a virgin and is unsure of his feelings. He is also obsessed by Alicia to a degree that her father finds unsettling but there are times when his friendship with Marco seems unusually intense.

Benigno is clearly a disturbed individual. He spent 20 years caring for a bedridden mother before switching his attention to Alicia. Some of the most telling scenes about him are the flashbacks, which show him spying upon the dancer from afar before working up the courage to approach her. Marco's past is less creepy but has left deep emotional wounds.

By Almodovar's standards this is almost a conventional film. It does not involve itself in the sexual revolving doors of many of his films but there is a special effects sequence of outrageous audacity, a short silent film fantasy in which a little man attempts to please a woman with what can only be described as total commitment. Almodovar has a way of evoking sincere responses from material which, if it were revolved only slightly, would be ironic. This film combines improbable melodrama, including gored bullfighters, and comatose ballerinas with subtly kinky bedside vigils and a sensational denouement, but ultimately we are undeniably touched.

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