The film won the Oscar for Best Screenplay. Semi-tragic fable that investigates the impulses and frailties of the male
Parla con lei (Hable con ella), released in Spanish theaters on March 15, 2002, the film with which Pedro Almodvar won the Oscar for Best Screenplay after his previous title of his filmography, All About My Mother (1999), took home the one for Best Foreign Film (now more correctly -? – renamed “Best International Film”) . More than twenty-five years had passed since his militant short films made while Generalissimo Franco was still alive (the first two, shot in 1974, were titled, incidentally, Political Film and Dos putas, or historia de amor que ends en boda or “two whores, or love story that ends in marriage “), twenty-two since his very poor and provocative debut (the crazy Pepi, Luci, Bom and the other girls of the bunch,” resurrection “flash in spite of himself and polaroid move of the exit from the dictatorship) and almost three decades from the worldwide success at the box office with the now legendary and almost proverbial Women on the verge of a nervous breakdown for which you are already almost “risking” the Oscar.
But Pedro was always on the move, constantly changing, in continuous approach to that state that the mathematician Archimedes theorized when he affirmed that by overcoming one’s limitations one could become “lords of the universe”. Those were years, for him, of revolution and (bad word) maturity. Do you want because after that ugly beast that the success critics of the early nineties had already begun to turn their backs on (not without reason: in hindsight the triptych Lgami, Tacchi a Spilo and Kika – A body on loan remains one of the most weak and “self-mannerist” of his career), either because the meaning and the rules of engagement impacting the early stages of his cinema had physiologically exhausted. Elusive and “mutant” like many of his funny and at the same time tragic characters, Almodvar had already made a couple of shameless changes of course (The flower of my secret, 1995, and Carne tremula, 1997) towards the forms and feelings of that very personal form of internalized and “affectionate” mlo that was All about my mother, manifest – even subtly mocking – of a completely female salvific solidarity capable of retuning spectators from all over the world to the frequencies of her heart.
In this new formal and empathic context, Speak to her seemed to most an “automatic” emergence of the new (but not so much) mindset and the reconfiguration of her cinema towards less “nervous” and more welcoming forms: but not so. If on a purely aesthetic level the perception could be superficially exact, what after twenty years still amazes and fascinates about Parla con lei is the “extreme” nature of a work that only apparently seems to follow the comfort of a groove already present to go into a cleverly hidden elsewhere. She talks to her the parallel narrative of the love of two men for women whose “nervous breakdown” has turned into a state of coma. The first Marco (Dario Grandinetti), macho Argentine writer in love with the dying bullfighter Lydia (Rosario Flores) who, after a perhaps unconsciously suicidal gesture, lies in the hospital at the mercy of a machine that keeps her alive after letting herself be gored in her latest bullfight; the second Benigno (Javier Camara), an affable gay (or perhaps fluid) nurse who takes care of the beautiful Alicia (Leonor Watling), a dancer in a persistent vegetative state, entertaining amiably with the tetragonal dance teacher Katerina (Geraldine Chaplin), a regular visitor .
Benigno who “talks to her”, convinced that to some extent Alicia can “hear” her words and her love and that the silence she gets in return is already an accomplice response. The circumstances (already predicted by chance: some time before they met, the two sat side by side in the theater where they were attending a performance by Pina Bausch) lead the two men to a state of “emotional” friendship; but all destined to crack when Benigno’s illusion of being able to have a “real” relationship with Alicia goes totally out of control. Accused of rape, he will end up committing suicide in prison; while Marco, after Lydia’s departure, may perhaps find her fate with Alicia, who miraculously woke up from a coma after giving birth to Benigno’s son. It’s hard to say if Almodvar was partially inspired by Dennis Potter’s scandalous pice Brimstone and Treacle (a controversial BBC commission for a 1976 TV-movie then frozen by the British state broadcaster and only aired in 1987: the story of a diabolical stranger raping a young woman in a coma); but his staging of that ethically nauseating gesture does not generate any repulsion. Indeed: inscribed in the stylization of a real that is perhaps only apparently such, the “violence” of the act is neutralized in an almost phantasmatic dimension that despite its tangible (also narratively) consequences rape (because this is what we are dealing with) appears almost a a “minor” event of a semitragic fable that unexpectedly places man (in the sense of male, with his drives and his frailties) at the center of Almodovarian thought.
Revered as a director “of women”, Pedro takes a sideways shift and here essentially places men at the center of attention: men who do not ask themselves the problem of exposing their feminine side; men who are not ashamed of crying or placing their feelings (and loved ones) on metaphorical pedestals like hospital beds; men who shamelessly fetishize their “objects” of love by exposing the mysterious and twisted functioning of their feelings. Equally difficult today to say whether a film like Talk to Her could still be celebrated and loved and understood in the same way in these whirlwind and hypocritical times of ballistic detection of improprieties and improprieties whose most significant results seem to be the debate on the adoption of schwa or the one on the liceit of cancel culture. Certainly some of the most beautiful “cinema” inventions of the film, such as the “ceremonial” dressing of the defenseless Lydia or the fake – and Bukowski – silent film Shrinking Lover (where a man accidentally shrunk by a potion explores the body of the woman he loves. until he is completely immersed in her vagina) that Benigno “tells” to Alicia (and which probably contains the ultimate meaning of his gesture of reverential adoration only coincidentally coinciding with the penetration) would probably not have an easy life.
March 15, 2022 (change March 15, 2022 | 11:49)
© Time.News