Susan Granger’s review of “Talk to Her” (SPC)
After seeing this extraordinary Pedro Almodovar film, you may wonder why it’s not eligible for a n Academy Award as Best Foreign Language Film this year. That’s because Spain chose to submit “Mondays in the Sun” as its national candidate for Oscar consideration. Too bad. The tender tragic comedy opens with a dancer careening like a sleepwalker across a stage littered with chairs while her partner rushes to clear these obstacles from her path. They’re performers but in the audience are two men: Marco (Dario Grandinetti), a travel writer who is weeping openly, and Benigno (Javier Camara), an instinctively compassionate nurse who is moved by the journalist’s tears. They then meet at a private clinic outside Madrid where the psychopathic Benigno is obsessively devoted to one patient – Alicia (Leonor Watling), a lovely, young dancer who’s in a coma after a car accident – and Marco keeps a vigil over his lover, Lydia (Rosario Flores), a comatose matador. The men develop a friendship, fueled by grief, loneliness and despair. The title comes from Benigno’s advice to Marco about continuing his efforts to remain intimate and to communicate. Both actors are superb and Geraldine Chaplin scores in a supporting role as Alicia’s ballet teacher. Pedro Almodovar, who delved into the female psyche with “Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown” & “All About My Mother,” now reveals an unexpected moral ambiguity hidden deep within the emotional lives and needs of men. Plus, he continues his penchant for the surreal with a clever allegory: a silent, black-and-white film-within-a-film, “Shrinking Lover.” On the Granger Movie Gauge of 1 to 10, “Talk to Her” is a complex, amusing, insightful 10. In Spanish with English subtitles, it’s not to be missed.
