Almodovar uses the characters' unlikely predicaments to show how we define ourselves by narration, but his story is so overdetermined that ultimately the two men seem as constrained as their brain-dead sweethearts.
Talk to Her (2002)
Tomatometer
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Reviews Counted:32
Fresh:29
Rotten:3
Average Rating:8.1/10
Consensus: Another masterful, compassionate work from Pedro Almodovar.
Rated: R [See Full Rating] for nudity, sexual content and some language
Runtime: 1 hr 54 mins
Genre: Foreign Films
Theatrical Release:Nov 22, 2002 Limited
Box Office: $9,031,416
Synopsis: The curtain before the stage, decorated with salmon colored roses and golden tassels, opens to present a Pina Bausch dance spectacle, "Café Müller". Among the spectators, two men are sitting... The curtain before the stage, decorated with salmon colored roses and golden tassels, opens to present a Pina Bausch dance spectacle, "Café Müller". Among the spectators, two men are sitting together by chance, they don't know each other. They are Benigno, a young nurse, and Marco, a forty-something writer. On the stage, filled with wooden chairs and tables, two women, their eyes closed and their arms stretched, are moving to the compasses of "The Fairy Queen" by Henry Purcell. The piece provokes such emotion that Marco breaks into tears. Benigno notices the shining tears of his casual companion in the darkness of the theatre's audience. He would like to tell him that he too is moved by the performance, but he doesn't dare. Months later, the two men meet again at "El Bosque", a private clinic where Benigno works. Lydia, Marco's girlfriend, a bullfighter by profession, has been gored by a bull and has fallen into a coma. Benigno in fact is in charge of another woman in a coma, Alicia, a young ballet student. When Marco passes by Alicia's room, Benigno approaches him. It is the beginning of an intense friendship, as linear as a roller coaster. During the time suspended within the walls of the clinic, the life of these four characters flows in all directions, past, present and future, leading all of them to an unexpected destiny. TALK TO HER is a story about the friendship of two men, about loneliness and the long convalescence of the wounds provoked by passion. It is also a film about incommunication among couples, and about communication. About film as a subject of conversation. About how monologues before a silent person can become an effective form of dialogue. About silence as "eloquence of the body", about film as an ideal vehicle/language in relationships between people, about how a film told in words can stop time and install itself in the lives of those who tell it and those who hear it. TALK TO HER is a film about the joy of narration and about the word as a weapon against solitude, disease, death and madness. It is also a film about madness, about a type of madness so close to tenderness and common sense that it does not diverge from normality. -- © Sony Pictures Classics [More]
Starring: Javier Camara, Dario Grandinetti, Leonor Watling, Rosario Flores
Starring: Javier Camara, Dario Grandinetti, Leonor Watling, Rosario Flores, Geraldine Chaplin, Mariola Fuentes, Lola Dueńas, Caetano Veloso
Director: Pedro Almodóvar
Director: Pedro Almodóvar
Screenwriter: Pedro Almodóvar
Producer: Agustin Almodovar
Composer: Alberto Iglesias
Studio: Sony Pictures Classics
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Reviews for Talk to Her
It is a singularly impressive work, able to generate laughs one moment and tears the next.
The best film of the past year, Talk to Her is adventuresome, sad, hilarious, odd and completely at peace with its own admittedly mad premise.
It would be interesting to hear from the other side, but in Talk to Her, the women are down for the count.
One of the finest films of 2002, the work of a master who shows no signs of slowing down.
This is Almodovar's stab at serious drama, and the result is bizarre and affecting but also unsettling in ways that the filmmaker may not have intended.
A powerfully moving film about men who think they want to lose themselves in their women, then are startled to realize that they're the ones who have been comatose.
Combines improbable melodrama (gored bullfighters, comatose ballerinas) with subtly kinky bedside vigils and sensational denouements, and yet at the end, we are undeniably touched.
Pure cinematic intoxication, a wildly inventive mixture of comedy and melodrama, tastelessness and swooning elegance.
The results are poetic, beguiling, elusive and definitively Almodóvarian.
This is a movie of great, rending compassion and artistry, and the ease with which it invites tears or laughter along with the hypnotic quality of the storytelling are the signs of a true master.
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