Talk-fiesta
Talk To Her, dir. Pedro Almodóvar.
Spain is a wondrous place, and it is the crucible of Almodóvar’s imagination. Aspects of each are strong meat, and even with the mellowing of his vision, some people will find part of this story difficult to contemplate. But when Almodóvar shocks, he does it with a playfulness so far removed from the leaden melodramas we usually see that we forgive him. His films have become gentler, ever since the
mellow surprise of The Flower Of My Secret, and we welcome it, but his beast is not tame. In the old days of his darkest comedies, sex and death were explicitly and very Spanishly enmeshed: Matador’s bloodlust is a mad joy, not a dreary SM routine. It is also horrible, and with him we don’t lose sight of that just as we don’t in Titus Andronicus. But we see too that we are in danger of reverting to savagery if only for a minute, as in Hemingway’s Death In The Afternoon when the corrida erupts in laughter at the catastrophic gutting of a picador’s horse. Hemingway argued that this was not schadenfreude or sadism; it was more in the line of a pratfall, a harsher slapstick. If you don’t feel for the butt of the joke, it is funny and even if you do feel for the victim, something in you walks as Hyde beside the Jekyll of your pity. In Talk To Her, Almodóvar revisits bullfighting with all the pageantry, superstition and brutality, yet his take on it has matured into something ineffably kinder and broader than in Matador.
The bullfighter in Talk To Her is a woman, Lydia (unforgettably acted by Rosario Flores, above left), and there is something of erotic surrender in the way she faces the bull, kneeling in her suit of lights with thighs spread like a limbo dancer. She is gored and ends up in a coma, tended by her latest lover, Marco (Darío Grandinetti, below left). We have seen Marco weeping at the very beginning of the film, coincidentally seated next to Benigno Martin (Javier Cámara) at a Pina Bausch performance. Benigno is a weirdo, a kind of innocent creep who is there for the woman he tends, a comatose ballet student (Leonor Watling, below right) he had been stalking for some time before the car accident that injured her brain. Echoes of Psycho and even Boxing Helena