Habla con Ella (Talk to Her) / Almodovar

Talk to Her (Hable con Ella in Spanish) is a Spanish drama made in 2002 and directed by the celebrated director Pedro Almodóvar.  The film tells the story of two men, Benigno and Marco, which share an odd situation and build a strong friendship. The story is mainly told in flashbacks. Benigno Martin (played by Javier Cámara) is an anti-social man with an incredibly good heart who is working as a nurse at a hospital, and Marco Zuluaga (Darío Grandinetti) is a famous Argentinian journalist who is well-known for his travel guide books. Marco falls in love with a famous woman bull fighter, Lydia Gonzalez (Rosario Flores) who is known for her past relationship with another famous bullfighter. One day during a bullfight, Lydia gets injured badly and is admitted into a hospital. She enters in a state of coma indefinitely.  While spending time in the hospital, waiting and wandering around, Marco meets Benigno who tells his own story to him. Benigno is the personal nurse of another patient in coma, Alicia, who is a beautiful dance student. Although Benigno sees Alicia as alive and as his lover, we understand from his story that he had been obsessed with her for a while before she was in coma. Benigno, since he sees Alicia alive and believes she hears him in coma, constantly talks to Alicia, telling everything in his life to her. When he meets Marco, he advises him to talk to Lydia as well and that’s where the film gets its title from. After a while, when Marco is abroad writing another travel book, Benigno is imprisoned due to allegations that he raped and impregnated Alicia in the hospital. Benigno accused of being a sociopath rapist, commits suicide in the end and the movie ends in the theater where it started and where Marco meets Alicia by chance.

Talk to Her, in my opinion, is a film with many themes and a film that is open to different interpretations since some vital things about the plot are ambiguous, like if Benigno really raped Alicia. Some believe that Benigno really raped her, or some say it was Marco, but it is never revealed in the movie who really impregnated her. Despite all, I see this film as a film about friendship, love and obsession and I see Benigno as a man with weak social skills and a very good heart. Many symbols and metaphors are used in the movie about life, emotions and love, an example is the short silent film clip about the love between a man and a scientist woman. Ultimately, I agree with Roger Ebert who noted ‘’… and yet at the end, we are undeniably touched. No director since Fassbinder has been able to evoke such complex emotions with such problematic material.’’

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

 The author was born in İzmir,Turkey in 1996 and is now living in Milan, Italy. He is currently studying International Economics and Management at Bocconi University. His fields of interests are history, politics and languages , and he is generally interested in social sciences. He speaks Turkish, English, Italian and a little bit of German and Russian. He started this blog in order to share his thoughts with people, to reach people who share similar interests and to create a platform for discussion. You can reach him via e-mail.

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