Review of Talk to Her (2002) by Colo G — 21 Oct 2012

After a triumphant reception in the world of the film "All About My Mother," literally sprinkled with a variety of awards - the award for Best Director at the Cannes Film Festival to the "Oscars", it seemed that the Spanish director Pedro Almodovar to fully take advantage of the situation and would be good to shoot and where anything, even in Hollywood! But exactly repeated the same case as the twelve-year cycle before, when, after the success of film "Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown," Almodovar, sensibly judged, refused to go to the ocean, and the American remake of these "women ..." nothing happened . Instead, he made perhaps his best picture "Contact me", where it was a runaway patient psychiatric clinic, who decided to take a hostage-known porn star, wanting from her only one thing - to get married and give birth to children.

In a way similar to the plot unfolds in the film "Talk to Her." Just two of the main characters Benigno and Marco albeit not spectacular, do not link their chosen, but, nevertheless, the two young women (dancer Alicia and bullfighter Lydia) are immobile, in fact - in an unconscious state, since a long time in a coma. And, naturally, they do not say a word! And men have no choice but to sit next to hospital beds, care for their loved ones to the best of opportunities, and talk of desperation or in the blind hope that they could hear their voices on a subconscious level.

Some had already sarcastically call this tape "Men on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown", which, in principle, is wrong, because Pedro Almodovar almost ten years (since the appearance in his own dead-end "Kiki") did not take off comedy, more giving preference for melodrama. It is felt in the "Flower of my secret," and "trembling flesh," and in the film "All About My Mother," which does not exclude the presence of these comic and even notes of sarcasm, as in the movie "Talk to Her." What stóit only one who became famous in an instant burlesque retelling of some of the old black-and-white tape that Benigno allegedly saw at the cinema! Her character is accidentally dropped, after drinking a miraculous elixir, and turned to his girlfriend just a fun toy, "pocket lover." And this verbal metaphor for the surreal hyperbole embodied in frankly burlesque moment when the poor (or doubly happy?) Man gets at night in his seeming incredibly huge woman's vagina!

Although something like it for 25 years before invented Bertrand Blier in a tragicomedy "Rest" - and wittily flamboyant image of a kind of absorption of masculinity, dissolve without a trace in the womb of a woman, that is, return it back to where it all happened, in actual case, has more serious implications. Do not you come and Benin, in effect, sacrificing himself, when, probably in the mad rush of feelings decides to criminal sexual contact with her comatose lover? But what happened in the end is a miracle: Alicia is pregnant and in labor awoke from almost lethargy.

True, it is the resurrection of "Sleeping Beauty" was given at the cost of several tragic deaths, and in the finals looming on the horizon, her new love affair with Marco could be a mere aspiration's essential to complete a truly sentimental story of reassuring happy ending. But Almodovar in his suddenly "male pattern" (is it that movies the men in the center of the story, he did not take off as the time since the "Contact me!") Does not solve the curtain accidentally reward only those who still would have been thrown at another turn of events. It provides two of the four main characters is a rare chance to start from scratch your own life completely untied their hands. And so on - as it will!