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Plot synopsis
In a dark theatre in Madrid, two men, strangers to one another, sit
side-by-side watching a modern dance. One man turns and notices that the
other has been immersed in the performance, silently shedding tears. The
first man is Benigno, a doughy misfit of ambiguous sexuality who works
as a nurse in a coma ward; the second man is Marco, a handsome
Argentinean journalist who still can't quite get over a woman he broke
up with years ago. At work the next day, Benigno tells his pretty
patient Alicia about how much he enjoyed the performance, and how the
man beside him was moved to the point of tears. Alicia loves dance more
than anything in the world, but makes no response: she can't, as a rainy
day car accident left her in a coma four years ago, and she's been lying
there in the hospital ever since. No matter to Benigno: the past four
years have been the happiest of his life, as his status as one of
Alicia's two private nurses has allowed him to spend nearly every day
with a woman that he had once worshipped from afar, back in the
pre-accident days when she would go to the dance studio located across
from his apartment. Now he watches over her health and keeps her looking
presentable; most of all, he talks to her. It's the talking that gets to
Marco when, by a terrible coincidence, his bullfighter girlfriend Lydia
falls comatose after being brutally gored, and ends up in the same
hospital in which Benigno cares for Alicia. Marco sits dutifully by
Lydia's side, day in and day out, and though there's so much he'd like
to let her know, he can't get over the futility of trying to converse
with a vegetable. So Marco can't talk to Lydia because he hates that she
can't talk back, and Benigno talks to Alicia because he has no fear that
she might talk back. But when a friendship springs up between Marco and
Benigno, the two men find that with each other, at least, they can have
real dialogue.
Review
Pedro Almodovar's movies have this amazing ability to genuinely surprise
me, in a way that feels totally natural rather that too-cleverly
manipulated. I never quite know where his characters are going with
their weird, complicated lives, but each character is so perfectly,
vividly realized that I believe in them wholeheartedly, even when
they're more than a little off their nut. Their behaviors make sense for
them, even when they don't make any sense to me; as a result, I always
feel like I leave an Almodovar movie with just a little better
understanding of what it might be like to live in the heads of folks who
are wildly different from me. Even when someone does something fairly
reprehensible, Almodovar's gotten me too involved with the character to
be able to really hate them. I feel unsettled, and icky, and a little
sad -- and ultimately, these are far more interesting reactions than
simple pure loathing. By refusing to judge anyone in black-and-white
good/bad terms, Almodovar always leaves open the possibility that
redemption is possible, and that one can find it in one's heart to
forgive almost anything. And there's something kind of beautiful and
generous about that. Talk to Me feels a whole lot weightier and
fair bit more sad than the raucously outré, somewhat absurdist-comedic
films that the director made earlier in his career. And yeah, it
features main characters that aren't wholly sympathetic, a rape, and a suicide. But the beauty of Almodovar's writing
and directing is that he can do all that, and still create a film that
leaves me feeling kind of optimistic about humanity, the world, our
future.
—reviewed
by Yee-Fan Sun
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