Talk to Her (15)

All about my lover

When one man asks another if he has split up from his girlfriend, the question could be a line from any movie. When one man asks another if he has split up from his girlfriend in the full knowledge that the girlfriend has been in a coma for the past two months, it could only be a line from a Pedro Almodovar movie. To understand why such a question could be posed, and in such a compassionate tone, moreover, one needs to have engaged with the previous hour or so of Talk to Her, Almodovar's latest and perhaps greatest film, a romantic drama that surpasses even his marvellous All About My Mother (1999) in terms of psychological intricacy and perverse comedy.

The film marks the peak of a glorious second phase in the Spanish director's career that began around the time of The Flower of My Secret (1995). Up to that point, his movies had been frantic, supercharged sex farces, the most famous of which, Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown (1989), persuaded Pauline Kael to call him "the most original pop writer-director of the Eighties – Godard with a human face". Great claims indeed, though baffling to those of us who'd actually sat through his movies and wondered whether something major had been lost in translation. By the mid-Nineties his fans were beginning to wonder, too, at which point Almodovar had changed direction – striking an intimate new tone and dispensing with the campier excesses of old. True, renegade nuns and transvestite husbands moonlighting as prostitutes still haunted the edges of All About My Mother, his most decorous movie hitherto, but now his preoccupation with sexual dysfunction had graduated to a more inclusive concern with human love and vulnerability.

Like last week's Lantana, the film takes a wry look at the role that coincidence plays in the attachments people form with one another. In flashback it unravels the story of two different relationships that have arrived at the same terminus. Marco (Dario Grandinetti) is an Argentinian travel writer who falls in love with a Spanish bullfighter named Lydia (Rosario Flores) after he sees her angrily batting away questions about her personal life on a TV chat show. He later performs the gallantry of killing a snake in her kitchen, though he is powerless to save her when she is horribly gored by a bull and dispatched to hospital in a coma. On the same ward, a male nurse Benigno (Javier Camara) has been tenderly supervising another coma victim, Alicia (Leonor Watling), a ballerina whom he first came to know after seeing her through the window of the dance academy opposite his apartment. The two men meet, for the first time as Marco thinks, but Benigno recognises him as the man he sat next to at a performance of Café Muller and who he watched as tears glistened in his eyes.

Benigno, who spent 20 years looking after his late mother, is a superb nurse though plainly not a regular guy – he's also trained as a beautician and enjoys needlepoint. "These last four years have been the richest of my life," he says of tending his comatose patient, whom he adores. Marco is bemused by this devotion, specifically the way Benigno talks to Alicia as if she were conscious. "Remember they're alive," he encourages Marco as he seats Alicia and Lydia together on deck chairs, leaning into one another. "It looks as though they're gossiping about us," he says cheerfully. With great tact, Almodovar introduces a fairytale element into the story, Alicia being the Sleeping Beauty whom only a miracle can awaken and Benigno the Beast who longs to be transformed by love. With its contrasting perspectives of intimacy and remoteness, one may also discern shades of Vertigo and a man's obsessive quest for a lost woman; the weeping strings of Alberto Iglesias's music lend a tragic dimension comparable to Bernard Herrmann's famous score.

Intimations of Benigno's pathology are expressed in a silent movie, Shrinking Lover, he sees one evening: it's a black-and- white expressionist dreamscape in which a man drains a potion and shrinks to the size of a thimble, obliging him to clamber over his sleeping lover's naked torso like an explorer, dwarfed amid soft white dunes. Only later does it emerge that Shrinking Lover may be a displaced representation of rape, and suddenly the film lurches into a black fairytale that's queasily reminiscent of Dennis Potter's Brimstone and Treacle. The question hangs in the air: what is permissible in the attempt to bring someone back to life? Benigno is no devil in disguise; on the contrary, he has been Alicia's devoted nurse and truest friend. But he is branded "a psychopath" for what he does. Even Marco recoils when Benigno tells him he wants to marry Alicia. "We get on better than most married couples," he protests.

Almodovar, prompting us to wonder at the limits of love, invests his two protagonists with an affecting humanity. When a psychiatrist asks Benigno what his problem is, he replies, "Loneliness, I guess", and many of the film's most striking images ache with solitude. The shot of Benigno, staring down from his apartment window at Alicia, is echoed towards the end as Marco talks to him through a windowed partition, and presses his hand against the glass beseechingly. "I wish I could hug you," says Benigno. "I've hugged very few people." In its way, Talk To Her is as profound an inquiry into the secret hearts of modern urban loners as Todd Solondz's Happiness. Both have shocking truths to tell, and it is a measure of Almodovar's strengths as a writer and the mesmerising performances by Javier Camara and Dario Grandinetti that one's sympathy is so willingly yielded.