FILM: Pedro Almodovar's "Talk to Her" opens in US theaters this week

When Geraldine Chaplin approached the stage to introduce "Talk To Her" at AFIFest in L.A. on Sunday night, anticipation throughout the packed theater was palpable. This 14th film by Spanish director Pedro Almodovar, in which Chaplin plays a rare feature role, was billed as the ten-day festival's closing night gem. It didn't disappoint.

"[Almodovar's] sense of comedy reminds me of my father [Charlie Chaplin], and his sense of tragedy reminds me of my grandfather [playwright Eugene O'Neill], she said, "Because of that, he feels like family."

"Talk to Her" begins where the director's last film "All About My Mother" (1999) ended: a gold-fringed theatrical curtain lifts to reveal a stage on which a wordless dance by German choreographer Pina Bausch unfolds. Two seemingly blind women careen toward walls and furniture; a male partner dashes in front of one, just in time to snatch a chair away from her violent trajectory. In the audience, the performance is moving one man to tears. The man seated next to him notices, and wants to tell his incidental companion that he too is moved--but can't.

Later, the two meet again when Marco (played by Dario Grandinetti) visits a clinic where his lover, a female bullfighter (Rosario Flores), lies in a coma having been badly gored in the ring. By chance, Benigno (Javier Camara) is a nurse there, looking after a young ballerina (Leonor Watling) who is also comatose.

"Talk to Her" explores the power of words and silence. It's a magnificent melodrama about the desire to communicate something impossible to someone who is unable to hear it. The film follows the lives of four central characters: two are physically crippled, two emotionally broken in exquisitely compelling ways.

Those more familiar with the in-your-face, over-the-top, punk rococo style of Almodovar's earlier films will find familiar elements here. Rape? Check. Drug overdoses? Check. Bullfighters? Check. Smoldering sexuality? Uh-huh. But shock-for-shock's sake is gone, replaced by an organically ornate, deliciously complex, mellowed aesthetic.

Near the film's surprising close, Chaplin's character--Alicia's mentor--turns to Marco and says, "I'm a ballet teacher; nothing is simple." Nothing about this film is simple. Narrative is divided into three parts, but sidewinds into layered, dreamlike sequences that skip forward, back, and outside of time completely. It's linear, but linear like a rollercoaster, or the tracks of snakes that the otherwise fearless bullfighter Lydia fears so much. It works.

Almodovar veers off into outrageously surreal comic detours--including a silent film within a film in which a palm-sized shrunken man leaps headfirst into his lover's vagina, where he lives happily ever after.

In another dream-scene tableau, Brazilian singer Caetano Veloso delivers a mindblowingly evocative reinvention of a classic Mexican ranchera to an open-air, nighttime assembly. The camera scans the crowd, capturing the impact on audience faces, including those of Lydia and Marco (who is again moved to tears). The song's lyrics presage their fate, and the moment is allegory for art as a primal force capable of stopping time and exploding into the lives of its witnesses:

They say that during the nights, he passed them, crying
they say he didn't sleep anymore
he passed them, drinking
they swear the sky shook at the sound of his crying
he suffered so much over her
until his own death, he cried for her
cucurrrucucu.... dove, don't cry for her anymore.

If anyone needed further proof that Almodovar is one of the most masterful directors alive, this is it. Don't miss this film.

Links: (movie site) (trailer) Discuss ("Talk to Her" opens in U.S. theaters on 11-22-02)