I love the absurdity of Almodovar films like Women on the Verge of the Nervous Breakdown. I enjoyed Volver very much; it had a cohesive plot and excellent performances, but also some of the comedy and absurdity of his previous movies. "Talk to Her" was well done, cohesive and excellently acted. I was particularly taken with the performance, in perfect Spanish, of Geraldine Chaplin. Although I enjoyed the movie and it is worth watching, it was not what I expected from Almodovar because all the characters seem to be damaged and have very sad lives. Consequently, it was depressing to me. I would rather be entertained by his films that contain absurd and humorous characters and situations.
June 11, 2008Anything by Almodovor is worth seeing, but he does have a weird idea of love. This drama was unexpected for me: most of the time, the love objects are in a coma, with more than half of the action taken up in the static atmosphere of a hospital: one man, unable to form relationships, loves his charge as a nurse to an absurd point; the other spends his time talking to his comatose girlfriend, but befriends the other man and also begins to love his patient.
While the story has psychological depth and a wonderfully consistent mood, I admit that I did not find it very interesting, when compared to his other films. There is little humor in it, the characters are so strange that I wondered why we should be concerned about them for 2 hours, and the emotions portrayed are extremely rarified to say the least.
May 13, 2008 |  | can you really talk to her? |  |
This film begins in one place by provoking questions about whether life in a persistent vegetative state is truly life, and whether and how a loved one might relate, if at all, to a person in a coma. Marco is a travel writer whose girlfriend Lydia is in a coma. When he asks the doctor whether there is any hope, the doctor responds, "Medically or scientifically, no, but if you choose to believe, go ahead." The male nurse Benigno does believe. He truly loves the dancer Alicia, who is a patient of his also in a coma. He talks to her, baths her, cuts her hair, and tenderly cares for her. He tells Marcos that the last four years caring for her have been the richest and most rewarding years of his life. The film would have been good enough with just this trajectory, but director Pedro Almodovar drives three of these four subjects toward entirely unexpected and ambiguous ends that leave you with many more answers than questions. In Spanish with English subtitles.
January 2, 2008A slyly subversive ode to love in all its myriad forms, Almodóvar's "Talk to Her" is an intimate, involving tale that examines the dark and even perverse nature of masculinity with great compassion. As always, Almodóvar coaxes exemplary performances from his actors, especially Grandinetti--whose teary Marco is movingly guilt-ridden about Lydia's injuries--and Camara, playing a naive man whose obsessive attachment to Alicia takes a black-comic turn. With its striking visual flair and even a mini silent-film fantasy evoking Buster Keaton, "Talk to Her" is an audacious love fable with an enormous heart.
July 25, 2007 | | intense and disturbing...... | |
HABLE CON ELLA (English translation: TALK TO HER) is a look at the lives of two men caring for coma patients, and how their lives intersect and are interconnected by their shared experience. Benigno Martin (Javier Camara) is a nurse who cares for Alicia (Leonor Watley), a beautiful ballerina, who went into a coma after being struck by a car. Marco Zuluaga (Dario Grandinetti) is a writer looking in on his girlfriend, Lydia Gonzalez (Rosario Flores), a bullfighter who was gored and knocked unconscious. Through a series of flashbacks and flashforwards, the pieces of their lives are put together like an intricate puzzle, with an unlikely twist at the end.
This film sent chills up my spine, in some of the sequences (for reasons I won't elaborate on, to ruin the film). This is only the second film I have seen by the Spanish filmmaker, Pedro Almodovar. I find his style as a director and writer to be at once provocative, grotesque and neurotic. The dynamic between the men and women in this story are in a word turbulent. Also, there is a surreal quality to the style of this film that is at once dreamlike and nightmarish. I came away feeling more than a little sick to my stomach......
March 23, 2007More reviews at Amazon.com ...
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