The last film that we watched by director Pedro Almodóvar was All About My Mother, a film that I found remarkable for having only female characters. Though the poster for this film features two women, both of them spend most of the time in a coma and so the film is really about the relationship of two different men with these two women while they are hospitalized.

One of these two women is Lydia González, a female matador who has just broken up with a fellow matador. Journalist Marco Zuluaga approaches her to write a story on her. Over the course of the next few months they become lovers but then she is gored by a bull during a fight and falls into a coma just after she says she has something important to tell him later. Meanwhile Benigno Martin is a personal nurse who stalks after Alicia Roncero, a beautiful dance student. When she becomes comatose following a car accident, her father hires Benigno to look after her, not knowing about his feelings for her. Needless to say, this makes Benigno very happy and he constantly talks to her as if she were conscious. Some of the other nurses are uncomfortable about how intimate he is with the patient but as he is more than willing to put in extra hours to take care of her, they let him be. Marco and Benigno get to know each other at the hospital and from there strike up an unlikely friendship.

Rereading my old post on the previous film, it seems that I didn’t like it much though I think if I were to rewatch it now my attitude would be softened. I immediately liked Talk to Her however despite the fact that it’s hard to say what it’s really about. One difference is that All About My Mother seemed to be a film about issues while Talk to Her is about characters, and in particular the very peculiar character that is Benigno. There’s a strong sense that the director simply sets up the characters and lets the story fall out of their interactions. Due to this, it’s hard to predict which direction the story will go at any given moment and so it’s hard to pin down which dramatic tropes the film will call upon. But this is also what makes this film so engaging to watch and of course the characters are always true to themselves.

The two halves of the film aren’t equal. The relationship between Lydia and Marco is more conventional and therefore less interesting, so it sometimes feels as if her hospitalization is just a way for Marco to meet Benigno and become friends with him. Benigno however is so fascinating that he can carry on the film all by himself. I loved how Marco clearly thinks that Benigno is mentally ill to some extent but takes what he says at face value and has some affection for him. It’s also great how ambiguously the director handles the moral issues involved. Benigno comes across as so naive that it makes sense why everyone else, including Alicia’s father, sees him as being essentially harmless even though they’re uncomfortable with him physically caressing Alicia’s insensate form as he massages her. In the same way, the emotions of the audience are pulled in opposite directions. There’s no doubt that Benigno is creepy and that Alicia would never have entertained any notion of a relationship between them were she conscious. Yet his affection for her is genuine and his tenderness is endearing.

To me the upshot is that real people and lives are complicated and varied and rarely fall into easily definable categories. Perhaps there isn’t even any need to see any statement in this film. Regardless of how you see it, Talk to Her is creative, engages the emotions in novel ways and pushes the boundaries of the audience, all the elements of a fantastic film.