Talk To Her (***1/2)
review by Ken Gumbs

Where do I begin? Well let’s begin with a genre. A place to neatly fit Talk to Her into, so we can all understand what kind of film we are dealing with. How about romantic comedy, that sounds safe, right? Well, this is a story about a man’s helpless devotion to a woman. And there are certainly some funny moments in this well written script. So love and comedy, I think we have found that nice little place right? Wrong!

A chance meeting at a ballet brings together Benigno and Marco. There the two men sit next to each other unaware that their lives will one day cross paths. Marco is a reporter who has fallen for a beautiful female bullfighter, but is struggling to reveal his feelings towards her. Benigno, on the other hand, is a complicated man who has spent the majority of his life tending to the needs of his now deceased mother. He becomes infatuated with Alicia, a ballerina who is studying across the street from his apartment. After a brief encounter and a weird stalking incident, Benigno finds his way into Alicia’s life. Sadly it takes a car accident, a coma, and a new job as a nurse at Alicia’s hospital. Weird, we haven’t even started! On the other side of this little film is Marco, who meets up with Benigno again in that same hospital after his girlfriend suffers a terrible accident at the hands of an opposing bull. Together, they begin deep relationships with their unconscious girlfriends. As odd as this story must sound to the reader of this review, let me assure you that Talk to Her is as charming as it is disturbing.

Benigno is not your common psychotic pervert; he is actually likable. We never tap into his boyish demeanor or the reason behind his unchangeable devotion to the women he cares about. We see a man that is simply in love with the idea of loving someone. He adores Alicia more than he could possibly adore his own life. Through Alicia, Benigno has meaning for life; in his eyes their love is not only real, but also eternal. His love is derived from his psychosis, but for some reason you end up liking him for it, or at least pitying him for it. His friendship with Marco seems to be the only link to any sense of reality left in Benigno’s personal life. Their comatose girlfriends have forced the two to form a deep friendship. Unlike Benigno, Marco has to deal with the gnawing reality of their situation and he cannot be swept away by the idea of love, like his friend has. If Marco is the last thread of reality holding Benigno in this world, that thread is broken when his relationship with Alicia becomes erotic.

If somehow you can dig deeper than the obvious “nutcase in love with a coma patient” story, you can find a really intelligent look at communication between men and women. These two men are in love with these women, but it isn’t until they are in commas that they can open up and begin to have “healthy” communications. Maybe writer and director Pedro Almodovar is saying that men need to resolve their fears of rejection before they can open up, or that communication is the base of all good relationships even when people are half dead. Whatever he is saying, I’m glad I got to hear it.

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