Hable con ella (2002)

User Rating:

8.0/10   

Director:

Pedro Almodóvar

Writer:

Pedro Almodóvar (writer)

Release Date:

15 March 2002 (Spain)

Genre:

Drama

Plot:

Two men share an odd friendship while they care for their girlfriends who are both in deep comas.

Plot Keywords:

Coma | Nurse | Theater | Ballet | Hospital

Awards:

Won Oscar. Another 32 wins & 28 nominations

Cast

Javier Cámara	...	Benigno Martín
Darío Grandinetti	...	Marco Zuluaga
Leonor Watling	...	Alicia
Rosario Flores	...	Lydia González
Mariola Fuentes	...	Rosa
Geraldine Chaplin	...	Katerina Bilova
Pina Bausch	...	Bailarina 'Café Müller'
Malou Airaudo	...	Bailarine 'Café Müller' (Dancer)
Caetano Veloso	...	Singer at party - "Cucurrucucú Paloma"
Roberto Álvarez	...	Doctor
Elena Anaya	...	Ángela
Lola Dueñas	...	Matilde
Adolfo Fernández	...	Niño de Valencia
Ana Fernández	...	Hermana de Lydia
Chus Lampreave	...	Portera

Also Known As:

Talk to Her (International: English title)

MPAA:

Rated R for nudity, sexual content and some language.

Runtime:

112 min | Turkey:104 min (TV version)

Country:

Spain

Language:

Spanish

Color:

Black and White | Color

Aspect Ratio:

2.35 : 1

Sound Mix:

Dolby Digital

Certification:

Italy:T | Philippines:R-18 | Singapore:R21 (re-rating) | Argentina:16 | Australia:MA | Austria:16 (Steiermark) | Canada:13+ (Québec) | Canada:14A (Ontario) | Canada:18A (Alberta/British Columbia) | Chile:14 | Finland:K-11 | France:U | Germany:16 | Hong Kong:III | Iceland:L | Ireland:18 | Netherlands:16 | New Zealand:R13 | Norway:11 | Peru:14 | Portugal:M/12 | Singapore:R(A) | South Korea:18 | Spain:13 | Sweden:11 | Switzerland:12 (canton of Geneva) | Switzerland:12 (canton of Vaud) | Switzerland:16 (canton of the Grisons) | UK:15 | USA:R

Filming Locations:

Aranjuez, Madrid, Spain

Company:

El Deseo S.A.

Trivia:

The bulls' bloodiness in the film is real. An ecological group in Madrid tried to sue Pedro Almodóvar for ill treatment of animals, not attacking him, as such, but society for accepting it. Almodóvar said that he had the permission of the bulls' owners to kill them and that the ecological group was just trying to gain some publicity.

Quotes:

Marco Zuluaga: Love is the saddest thing when it goes away, as a song by Jobim goes.

Movie Connections:

Referenced in Chacun son cinéma ou Ce petit coup au coeur quand la lumière s'éteint et que le film commence (2007)

Soundtrack:

Hain't It Funny

Cinema heaven

Benigno and Marco are both lonely men, Marco because his lover, a woman bullfighter, is in a coma, Benigno, a thirty-year old virgin Momma's boy, from habit. Both are in love, too (Benigno, a male nurse at the clinic, slavishly tends Alicia, a comatose accident victim, for a living). It is he who gives Marco, with whom he strikes up a friendship, the eponymous advice: talk, and your heartfelt monologue will be more meaningful and therapeutic than any marital dialogue.

Seeing Almodóvar's latest film was one of the most pleasurable cinema experiences I have had for some time. He has over the years amassed the technical skill and maturity to put across quite complex stories in a deceptively simple language. From the shock tactics and punk aesthetics of Pepi, Luci, Bom, y otras chicas del montón (1980), to the Oscar-winning melodrama of All About My Mother (1999), he had already come a long way. Here, finally, was an interweaving of the lives of disparate characters that was not only unabashed in its excess (it always had been), it actually made you care – deeply.

More bullfighting

At first sight Hable con ella looks like being another case study in that famously offbeat, not to say queer, book of life according to Pedro. Almodóvar's scenarios have been no strangers to sex, drugs, and heartrending canción (a particular brand of overwrought singing which knows no real Anglo-Saxon equivalent). In Hable con ella we have bullfighting, a theme he used as an excuse for kinky sex in Matador, given a contemporary treatment in the person of 'torera', Lydia (female bullfighters are indeed beginning to compete in a man's profession). Here too we have the apparently off-the-wall and by now notorious scene from the film-within-the-film, El Amante Minguante, in which a shrunken hero takes refuge in his lover's vagina for protection. But neither is gratuitous gesture: Lydia is designed to counterpoint Marco's almost feminine sensitivity, and the latter sequence, far from being there to shock, is a metaphor to spare us a far more harrowing, and morally problematic, plot truth. The ability to turn kitsch into art is increasingly one of Almodóvar's defining features.

Post-modern?

While he often refers to other artforms in his films (reality TV in Kika, Ruth Rendell in Live Flesh, canción in High Heels), since All About My Mother the technique has become more assured. Where that film was a paean to female suffering, via All About Eve and A Streetcar Named Desire, in Hable con ella we have two men sharing a tear over a performance by the dancer Pina Bausch. Other references are the Brazilian singer Caetano Veloso, who sings at a party attended by (uncredited) Cecilia Roth and Marisa Paredes (from Mother), and Michael Cunningham, whose novel The Hours similarly has a tripartite structure where each section deepens and sheds light on the others ('tunnels in caves'). In other words the post-modernist borrowing is rendered invisible by being absorbed into the drama: it is not post-modern any more.

Almodóvar's choice to make a film about the loneliness and longing of men is a courageous one for a very private celebrity, a gamble to follow what might have been the peak of his career, and one which whets our appetite for what is to come.