Talk to Her film review

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HABLA CON ELLA (TALK TO HER)

Almodovar's latest has the unusual distinction of receiving an Academy Award nomination for Best Director and Best Original Screenplay despite not being submitted by his native country for the Best Foreign Film category (that honour went to Fernando Leon's Mondays in the Sun, which failed to make the final five up for review). Such is the measure of the extravagant Spaniard's popularity that the American award givers seem to regard him as the foreign film director du jour. Since he won the Oscar for Best Foreign Film with his last outing for All About My Mother he has burst onto the mainstream world stage and has remained its darling - unlike his contemporary, the Italian Roberto Benigni, who achieved similar status with Life is Beautiful but appears to have committed career suicide with the recent Pinocchio.

Talk to Her received near unanimous adulation when it was released last Spring and subsequently became one of the most profitable foreign language films of 2002. The trouble is, Almodovar's audience is divided into those who adore his trait of mixing outlandish soap operatic plots with high art, and those who can't stand his work for the very same reason. Consequently, if you're in the former club then this is definitely a movie for you, but if you regard his work as barely better than a lunchtime Latin tele-novela, then there is likely to be little here to change your mind.

The film concerns two coma victims. One is Alicia, a ballerina who is carefully, if not obsessively, tended for by her male nurse Benigno.There is definitely something not quite right about Benigno - his back story shows that he had far too close a relationship with his mother, and that he even stalked Alicia when she used to dance at a studio near his house. Definitely an odd choice for a sympathetic central character.

The other victim is Lydia, a female bullfighter who has been rendered unconscious in a recent attack by one of her prey. Her lover Marco is a constant at her bedside and Benigno encourages him to 'talk to her', assuring him that it can only help. Lydia and Alicia soon become unlikely best buddies, unconscious friends with two obsessive men hovering around them, until a singularly unpleasant incident at the hospital throws the relationship between all four into question.