When
Geraldine Chaplin approached the stage to introduce "Talk
To Her" at AFIFest in L.A.
on Sunday night, anticipation throughout the packed theater was palpable. This
14th film by Spanish director Pedro Almodovar, in which Chaplin plays a rare
feature role, was billed as the ten-day festival’s closing night gem. It didn’t
disappoint.
"[Almodovar’s] sense of comedy reminds me of my father [Charlie Chaplin],
and his sense of tragedy reminds me of my grandfather [playwright Eugene O’Neill],
she said, "Because of that, he feels like family."
"Talk to Her" begins where the director’s last film "All About
My Mother" (1999) ended: a gold-fringed theatrical curtain lifts to reveal
a stage on which a wordless dance by German choreographer Pina Bausch unfolds.
Two seemingly blind women careen toward walls and furniture; a male partner
dashes in front of one, just in time to snatch a chair away from her violent
trajectory. In the audience, the performance is moving one man to tears. The
man seated next to him notices, and wants to tell his incidental companion that
he too is moved–but can’t.
Later,
the two meet again when Marco (played by Dario Grandinetti) visits a clinic
where his lover, a female bullfighter (Rosario Flores), lies in a coma having
been badly gored in the ring. By chance, Benigno (Javier Camara) is a nurse
there, looking after a young ballerina (Leonor Watling) who is also comatose.
"Talk to Her" explores the power of words and silence. It’s a magnificent
melodrama about the desire to communicate something impossible to someone who
is unable to hear it. The film follows the lives of four central characters:
two are physically crippled, two emotionally broken in exquisitely compelling
ways.
Those more familiar with the in-your-face, over-the-top, punk rococo style
of Almodovar’s earlier films will find familiar elements here. Rape? Check.
Drug overdoses? Check. Bullfighters? Check. Smoldering sexuality? Uh-huh. But
shock-for-shock’s sake is gone, replaced by an organically ornate, deliciously
complex, mellowed aesthetic.
Near
the film’s surprising close, Chaplin’s character–Alicia’s mentor–turns to
Marco and says, "I’m a ballet teacher; nothing is simple." Nothing
about this film is simple. Narrative is divided into three parts, but sidewinds
into layered, dreamlike sequences that skip forward, back, and outside of time
completely. It’s linear, but linear like a rollercoaster, or the tracks of snakes
that the otherwise fearless bullfighter Lydia fears so much. It works.
Almodovar veers off into outrageously surreal comic detours–including a silent
film within a film in which a palm-sized shrunken man leaps headfirst into his
lover’s vagina, where he lives happily ever after.
In another dream-scene tableau, Brazilian singer Caetano Veloso delivers a
mindblowingly evocative reinvention of a classic Mexican ranchera to an open-air,
nighttime assembly. The camera scans the crowd, capturing the impact on audience
faces, including those of Lydia and Marco (who is again moved to tears). The
song’s lyrics presage their fate, and the moment is allegory for art as a primal
force capable of stopping time and exploding into the lives of its witnesses:
They say that during the nights, he passed them, crying
they say he didn’t sleep anymore
he passed them, drinking
they swear the sky shook at the sound of his crying
he suffered so much over her
until his own death, he cried for her
cucurrrucucu…. dove, don’t cry for her anymore.
If anyone needed further proof that Almodovar is one of the most masterful
directors alive, this is it. Don’t miss this film.
Links: (movie site) (trailer)
Discuss ("Talk to Her" opens in U.S. theaters on 11-22-02)