Talk to Her . . .
Make Sure She’s Conscious
#FilmspottingHomework: №1
The time is fast approaching the annual movie event of the year. No, not the Oscars: Filmspotting Madness. A tournament of agonizing choices and lots and lots of talk about the nuances of movies and reckoning with why we like movies (or don’t).
The new and improved Madness format now includes a short list of films under consideration for the best of the 2000s tournament, it’s 82 films long right now (subject to change), only 75 of which will make the tournament, with a bunch of play-ins for edge cases. We need this short list because the new “On your honor” voting philosophy is to only vote in matchups where you have seen both movies. Hence the many months run up to the tournament: we need time as an audience to wrestle with all of this before we really get our hands dirty.
Here we are in September 2018 and here’s the list as it currently stands:
I know, that doesn’t look hard, it’s just 16 movies and we’ve got 6 months before the tournament, but that’s . . . 3 movies a month (counting some movies I want to revisit) and that’s practically a movie a week, on top of the new release calendar. Well, holy crap. That’s a lot more work than it looks. Welp, since this is a slow period, let’s hit some of the low hanging fruit, meaning the flicks I don’t have to rent yet. I also did not feel like being angry (Atonement, I’m looking at you — I HATED that book so much) or extremely sad (e.g. Away from Her and Brokeback Mountain) just yet, so I went for Pedro Almodóvar’s Talk to Her.

I didn’t actually know what to expect from Talk to Her, it’s only my second Almodóvar, though the plot descriptions about the intersecting lives of the men who are taking care of women who are in comas, seemed promising, like a weird story that is going to feature some interesting characters and probably not going to be terribly straightforward. Well, I was right about part of that.
In many ways, I am sympathetic to what Almodóvar is trying to do in Talk to Her. He’s fascinated by bodies in space. The movie opens with a Pina Bausch dance piece, in part because the nurse who takes care of the woman was a dancer (the English subtitles use the word ballerina, but there is no world where Pina Bausch’s work can be reduced to ballet). And in part, no doubt, because Almodóvar wants to compare and contrast the exquisite control of the dancers with the utter lack of control of the coma patient. The other coma patient is a lady bullfighter who gets gored in the opening moments of an important . . . bout? Fight, whatever. The trappings of bullfighting are very clearly compared to those of dance: the bullfighter also wears a costume, also trains very hard, also moves ritualistically, etc. Inspired by the abstract formality of dance, Almodóvar moves his camera in such ways, seeking out forms and shapes in interesting perspectives, using what feels like improvisation, lots of little flourishes that don’t feel choreographed, but like a Bausch piece, probably are exquisitely choreographed, creating movement around the coma patients who are, you know, inert.
I would be down to dig into all of this formal invention, this interest in dance, the relationship between the operatic score of the film, which never feels separate from the dance or from the bullfighting even when it’s in the hospital. I would care about all of that, but . . .
There are flashes of problematic questions of consent from the beginning of the film, from the first sponge bath, where the camera is as unblinking as the nurses and as unphased by the unerotic nature of an nerveless female form with no brain activity. And for awhile we can pretend that this question of consent is an undercurrent because one of the men, Marco, the partner of Lydia, the bullfighter, is quite sensitive. He’s interested in her story, her truth, he doesn’t do any of that macho shit you worry a dude dating a bullfighter might have to work through. But. But butbutbutbubtutbuuuuuuuuuut.

The other man in this movie, Benigno, the nurse who attends Alicia, the dancer is a huge problem. He steals personal things from Alicia, who is, as a reminder, IN A COMA, but we come to learn that he was essentially stalking her prior to her accident. He lives across from the dance studio, where he can see her in class. He makes himself a patient of her father’s, where he pretends he’s gay (a thing that he tries to use to his advantage later, in a much more problematic way), breaks into Alicia’s side of the apartment she shares with her father and his practice, steals something and leaves, just in time to walk in on a nearly naked Alicia who has just gotten out of the shower, while the secretary emerges from the doctor’s office and fixes herself, a coy reference to sexual activity that is especially gross considering what Benigno was just doing. In a post #MeToo world, I have a hard time believing this film even gets made, quite frankly and I haven’t even mentioned that Marco and Alicia end up together in a bizarre turn of events, which is, in and of itself a bit egregious, and, oh yeah, that Benigno goes to prison for impregnating Alicia while she was IN A COMA.
There might be a world where Almodóvar is wrestling with questions of consent in this movie but it plays like a quirky romantic comedy and that Benigno is basically harmless, so no. Just no, that all pretty much slams the door on Talk to Her in my book. I’m going to move up my revisit of Volver (mercifully on Netflix) to make sure I didn’t get that movie completely wrong, but at the moment, I’m rooting hard for Talk to Her not even making the tournament and not much interested in exploring the rest of Almodóvar’s work either.
