Metro Pulse/Movie Guru/Talk To Her

Movie Guru Rating:

Meditative (3 out of 5)

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Even if you Talk to Her, she may not be able to hear

by Adrienne Martini

Of late, I've been having tiny timing issues, as if the world were running in common time and my metronome were set at 7/8s. Until last weekend, they were small enough to be ignored. My phone calls miss interview subjects by mere seconds. Email arrives too late to be useful. Great solutions to minor irritations leap to my head mere iotas after a different solution has already presented itself. The Metro Pulse office is in recarpeting shambles the one week I desperately need to be there. And, twice now, I've missed a movie at Downtown West and had to return when the scheduling stars shone more brightly.

Both of these ships-in-night occasions are easily pinned on the weather. The first time—I was heading to a screening of The Hours—a brief respite from snow drove flocks of folks into the theater, making it nearly impossible to buy tickets before the movie actually started. Purely my fault—and had I arrived not five minutes earlier, I could have avoided the line. Rain was the culprit the second time. This weekend's endless falling water knocked out power on Kingston Pike, snarling traffic and, incidentally, making it impossible to run a projector.

Normally, I'd not mention such things. The average reader couldn't give a rat's rump what my rhythm problems are. Who cares if I'm running in jazz time as long as the paper goes to press and this space is filled? The only person it matters to is me, and I'm certain it will resolve itself in time. But Pedro Almodovar's films—especially Talk to Her—can't help but raise questions about timing and coincidence and make my recent temporal weirdness seem germane.

Talk's entire story is built on a coincidence. Two strangers, the pudgy Benigno (Javier C�mara) and the studly Marco (Dario Grandinetti), end up sitting next to each other at a Pina Bausch modern dance performance. The piece, which involves two women with their eyes closed flinging themselves around a room full of chairs, moves Marco to tears. Benigno notes Marco's reaction and later relates it to Alicia, a girl in a coma who Benigno is caring for. And it comes full circle, when Marco's matador girlfriend ends up in a coma in the very same hospital as Alicia and Benigno and Marco meet again. This series of coincidences left me pondering my own series of same. Would the couple that I stepped over to go pee—women's bodily functions being, coincidentally, another of Almodovar's pet fascinations—turn up later in my life?

Almodovar's best work explores the nature of happenstance, and you casually accept that such things really could occur in the world or in, at least, his romanticized version of it. Yet for all of the romance and melodrama, Almodovar is also thoroughly modern, juxtaposing baroque Spanish architecture with hard-edged themes with unsettling results. As much as I can admire Almodovar's film-making skill, I've never been in synch with his storytelling rhythm, which leaves me cold and curious as to what all of the fuss is about.

Talk is no different. Despite some clever moments—especially the silent film sequence in which a man shrinks to car key-size, crawls up the vagina of his lover and stays there—Talk fails to hang together as a complete picture and can't quite find its focus. Is it about men's preferring women who are indistinguishable from potted plants? Is it about fate's fickle finger? Is it about desires that dare not be mentioned in public? Or is it about something else entirely, say, fast cars and bullfights? I honestly have no idea.

It could be, however, that Almodovar trades in a language I can't understand—and, no, I don't mean Spanish. Let's call it—as icky as this phrase sounds—the language of men. I can't get Almodovar for the same reason I can't get Eminem. Both have catchy beats. Both create hypnotizing art. Both have personas that are larger than their work—and those personas have as many detractors as they have fans. Almodovar may be the Eminem of the film scene, and his views about women seem just as vitriolic and spiteful as the Detroit rapper's, which makes it difficult to separate the man from his message.

Which isn't to say that Talk isn't a well-made film. It is, certainly, but it feels too pat and contrived to be a great film. Or, it could be that I'm simply unable to see the greatness that lies within it, given both my gender and my recent issues with timing. It could also be that this is exactly Almodovar's point, that men are talking to women yet can't be understood, and hence Talk actually works quite well.