THREE STARS

BY BILL THOMPSON
Of the Post and Courier staff

Pedro Almodovar reminds you of no one but himself.
So distinctive is the Spanish filmmaker’s work that it could not have been done by anyone else. There are few obvious influences or traditions from which his movies emerge, other than that of the more liberated Spanish cinema he helped establish.
His latest, “Talk to Her” is vintage Almodovar: audacious, layered, playful and somber, and unconcerned with conventional narrative. It’s about life, love, death — the whole damn thing. But chiefly it asks questions: What is the nature of life? How many ways are there to define what love is? When is an apparent act of perversity also an act of devotion?
Almodovar’s wicked sense of humor runs from mordant to racy and back in this touching tragi-comedy, whose binding thread is the freeing and constricting powers of need. He has rendered his most mature movie to date.
Once again, his characters (and their relationships) flirt with a sublimely sweet, sublimely dreadful doom. But the director limits his customary slapstick and melodramatic trappings for this story about two comatose women and the men who adore them.
And it is the men who drive the tale. Almodovar’s knack for understanding women and working with actresses does not mean his male characters are superfluous. Certainly not in “Live Flesh” and “Law of Desire,” earlier films in which men defined the action.
“Talk to Her” pivots on Benigno (Javier Camara), a male nurse who tends to the needs of his unconscious patient, Alicia (Leonor Watling), as one might to a lover. For four years he has talked to her, constantly, softly, his voice and his movements acting as one deliberate, delicate mechanism in the daily routine of her therapy. During this time he has also cared for his aging mother. These are the lone engagements of a placidly uneventful life, apart from trips to the theater or cinema. His limitations aside, Benigno is a creature of compassion and generosity, though his motivations are at first murky.
Enter a middle-aged writer named Marco (Dario Grandinetti), who keeps silent vigil over the recently institutionalized Lydia (Rosario Flores). She is also deeply embedded in a coma, with scant chance of recovery. These immobilized women were both intensely, expressively physical in life, Alicia as a dancer, Lydia as one of a very few female bullfighters. Soon, the two men are drawn into the each other’s sphere, and a friendship begun.
Benigno, we gradually learn, is more than a little obsessive. His actual connection to Alicia is nil, though they had had a casual encounter before her accident. But now, in unconsciousness, she “belongs” to him, and Almodovar unfolds what is at once a tender love story and an (initially) disturbing study of benign violation. Meanwhile, Marco has befriended Benigno, and his loyalty — the linchpin of the story — is soon to be tested by an extraordinary occurrence.
In the end, Almodovar insists that we not only harbor sympathy for a man (Benigno) whose behavior is unpardonable, despite its fortuitous outcome, but empathy as well. The director suggests that, like Benigno, we all dwell in prisons of a kind. And it is loyalty that makes them bearable.
The razor-edged frenzy and cruelty of Almodovar’s early plots, which were equally jolting and amusing, are absent from this telling. However bizarre, the elements of “Talk to Her” are introduced unhurriedly, and with a kid glove rather than a mailed fist.
Almodovar can still unnerve you, but his shocks are now more measured. As in the silent film (“Shrinking Lover”) sequence that seems a diversion from the main action yet proves indispensable to the story. The sequence is, in fact, a front for what’s really going on in Alicia’s hospital room.
It’s Almodovar at the peak of his powers: mysteries and secrets, abandonment and attachment, love and malice, tone upon tone, and a rich color palette. Few filmmakers lead us into the lives of intimate strangers quite so provocatively or so deftly, or leave us with so many lingering impressions.

Bill Thompson covers movies and books. Contact him at 937-5707 or bthompson@postandcourier.com.