Year of the Coma
It’s been nearly three years since Pedro Almodóvar’s All About My Mother won the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film. Perhaps it’s in the spirit of spreading things around that Spain has not nominated Almodóvar’s latest, Talk to Her, as its entry this year. It’s hard to imagine any other reason to overlook this extraordinary film.
Almodóvar’s female protagonists usually provide the narrative’s point of view, but Talk to Her sticks rigorously to its male characters. The film’s two most important women spend most of their screen time literally comatose.
Despite that, Talk to Her is, in tone and structure, immediately identifiable as Almodóvar. Its first shot announces its pride in artifice. A curtain rises on a ballet performance, but it’s clear that this is the curtain for the film rather than for the dance. Within the story of the ballet, two women fall — a symbolic teaser for what is to come. Weeping in the audience is Marco (Daráo Grandinetti); watching Marco cry is Benigno (Javier Címara), who is strangely moved and intrigued.
Cut to a hospital room, where Benigno is describing the ballet to the beautiful Alicia (Leonor Watling), a dance student who lies comatose in a bed. He isn’t just running his mouth; as her nurse, he believes that it is crucial therapy. “You have to talk to women,” he says later. “They like that.”
A few months later, Marco and Benigno meet again when a hideous mishap puts Marco’s current love, Lydia (Rosario Flores), into a coma as well, and she ends up down the hall from Alicia. The two men become friends, though they seem to have little in common. Marco is “normal” — a brooding, decidedly masculine journalist. Benigno is “strange” — a thirtyish virgin who has spent most of his life waiting on his mother. He is assumed by many to be gay, but in truth he’s not quite sure what he is.
Almodóvar leaps around in time, and we learn that Benigno’s attachment to Alicia isn’t merely professional. For a period before her accident — while mourning his mother’s death — he observed her from his apartment window as she danced at the school across the street. He fell in love, but his cocooned life had rendered him socially inept.
Alicia’s accident fulfills an unconscious wish, allowing Benigno to relate to her in the only way he knows — by looking after her. Awake, she was creeped out by his approaches; comatose, she is utterly accepting.
One of the film’s best sequences re-creates a silent film the way Benigno describes it to his unconscious love, as a hybrid of fantasy and memory. Like much of Talk to Her, it is simultaneously hilarious, disturbing and heartbreakingly poignant. Indeed, Almodóvar’s contemporary gloss on Sleeping Beauty feels like an adult fairy tale. It hints at the magic that both wondrously and hideously lurks beneath everyday reality.
