Talk to Her: Pedro Almodóvar

The following is not a traditional Mini Review. Instead, it is an essay that I wrote for my Film Forum Film Sense class at NYU - Tisch. Besides my problems with the film (which I discuss within this essay), I still believe that it is a well-crafted film. As a result, despite my reservations, I have given it a good score.

While reading Despina Kakoudaki’s illuminating essay on the nature of coincidences in Pedro Almodóvar’s film Talk to Her, I found great resonance with one of her key points surrounding the nature of the relationships between the film’s characters. The film, which follows two men, Benigno, a nurse, and Marco, a journalist, who become friends and bond over their relationships with two comatose women, has been praised as an example of Almodóvar’s fascination with melodrama borne from coincidence. Almodóvar skillfully weaves the tale of these two men and their women who seem destined to be a part of each others’ lives. From their first chance meeting in a ballet hall to their last goodbye in a Spanish prison, these two men seem inextricably bound. When it is revealed that Benigno had raped and impregnated Alicia, the comatose woman that he had looked after for years, Marco’s girlfriend, a female toreador who was gouged during a bullfight, unfortunately dies. Alicia’s pregnancy led to her reawakening out of her coma. Ironically, this happens after Benigno’s incarceration and eventual suicide. By a stroke of fate, Marco and Alicia meet one night at the same ballet hall where he and Benigno had met. The film then implies with a subtitle reading Marco y Alicia that the two are destined to fall in love and be together.

However, while originally watching the film, I found this ending to be disconcerting. I couldn’t specifically rationalize what bothered me about it either. But upon reading Kakoudaki’s essay, I feel that she had perfectly described the source of my discomfort. While describing Marco’s reconciliation with Alicia, a woman who was oblivious of their prior relationship, she mentioned that it could be interpreted as a subconscious apology designed by Almodóvar for Alicia’s behavior:

“Alicia says “yes” (to Marco) rather than saying “no” (to Benigno). This is how the film ensures that we can forgive her for waking up: in the emotional logic of melodrama (which here replicates a logic that is unfortunately endemic in rape cases as well), the audience may have already forgiven [Benigno’s rape of Alicia]. The only “crime” that remains is hers, because her life has taken away his. It is this illogical crime that we have to forgive, and indeed forgive implicitly and silently, and without being aware of the process. The fact that we know her story is a liability for Alicia because it might actually cause the audience’s disengagement from her."

Then I realized my problem with Almodóvar’s melodramatic reasoning. Assuming that Kakoudaki was correct and Almodóvar did in fact construct the ending so that Alicia could be redeemed in the eyes of the audience, then this speaks to a disturbing sub-context in Talk to Her: even though Alicia has awoken from her coma wherein she was idolized as a fetishized object by Benigno, she is still viewed by Almodóvar, and therefore the audience, not as a human, but as a thing.

Although Alicia and Marco’s dead toreador girlfriend are prominent characters, they are still secondary when compared to the two male leads. As a result, the film is almost explicitly told through their perspectives. When we first see Alicia after she has awoken from her coma near the end of the film, it is through the eyes of Marco who spies her in a dance studio. We are not shown any of Alicia’s shock or terror at waking up from a coma that lasted for years. As a result, when Marco sees Alicia in the dance studio, the audience is led to assume that the worst of her pain and difficulty at readjusting has already occurred. Therefore, it becomes easier for us to resent Alicia for cheating Benigno despite his (admittedly criminal and psychopathic) behavior.

Furthermore, consider that even after the extent of Benigno’s crimes are revealed, Almodóvar still frames him as a sympathetic character. This sympathy can be seen in how Marco reacts to the news of his death. Marco puts one of Alicia’s hair clips that Benigno had stolen into his front pocket before he is buried. Considering that the hair clip had shown up several times before in the film, this is given additional emotional (and sympathetic) weight considering how, as Kakoudaki points out, “the emotional content of the hair clip is thus created both by its recurrence in the film and by Marco’s grief in the final scene.” Not to mention that the bestowal of a keepsake from his victim is in and of itself disturbing. After all, imagine somebody putting a lock of Sharon Tate’s hair in Charles Manson’s coffin. So, whether he intended it or not, Almodóvar has transformed Benigno from a rapist to a victim.

Perhaps I am overanalyzing this. After all, Almodóvar has long been praised for his portrayal of women in his films. But in Talk to Her, Almodóvar seems so eager to reaffirm the theme of fate and coincidence which runs in most of his films that he sacrifices any possibility of the audience conceiving Alicia as a believable character. By ignoring the pain that would inevitably come from being awoken from a coma to discover that one had been raped and impregnated, Alicia seems to be a kind of waif with no regard for the doomed affections of Benigno. I am not necessarily accusing Almodóvar of some kind of misogynist underpinning in Talk to Her. Instead, I believe that in his quest to create a great love story, Almodóvar accidentally overlooked a crucial factor in the construction of his characters, their motivations, and the ways in which he would present their plight to his audience.

Works Cited
Kakoudaki, Despina. Intimate Strangers: Melodrama and Coincidence in Talk to Her. All About Almodóvar: A Passion for Cinema. Edited by Bradley S. Epps and Despina Kakoudaki. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009.

8/10