Talk to Her
2002 ‘Hable con ella’ Directed by Pedro Almodóvar
Synopsis
Director Pedro Almodóvar tells a story of loneliness, intimacy, secrets, infidelity and the difficulty of communication between sexes. Typical of the Spanish director, Almodóvar puts the women in the middle of the action, however, it’s a male correlation that arises from the story.
Cast
Popular reviews
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The second and greatest film in what I like to refer to as Pedro's Trans-Gender trilogy. With All About My Mother you begin with an incapacitated/dead male and continue with a story that is almost exclusively female. With Talk To Her this is reversed and it is the females who are incapacitated for a male story. With Bad Education, you are dealing exclusively with male characters.
This film is a beautiful and touching exploration of loneliness. All power to Pedro for being able to make sympathetic a character who has done despicable things. The implementation of the silent film sequence is a thing of great beauty as is the fact that The Academy chose to honor this film with Best Original Screenplay. Oh and the dance sequences too. So much beauty in this film. Even midst the darkness.
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As the poster is quick to suggest, Almodóvar's Oscar-winner bears some similarities thematically and structurally to Bergman's Persona. Inverting gender—in that we see the gradually increasing similarities between two men—it has a good deal of comment to pass on masculinity, femininity, and sexuality. A vibrant use of colour and an operatic emotional register contribute an epic sense of melodrama, knowingly grandiose yet never overshadowing the down-to-earth characters. There are aspects to Almodóvar's style that don't quite fit my own tastes, but it's very much a personal problem, and one only very minutely applicable here. Aided by a quartet of fine performances and a thematically-weighted narrative, it's a smart and thought-provoking piece with a lot of entertainment value.
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This was my first Almodovar film. Is every Almodovar film as good as this one?
Whew.
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My first Almodóvar. Gripping throughout and the characters are extremely well-developed. The concept is brilliant and the execution definitely does it justice. One of my new top foreign films.
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Talk to Her is a film I have been meaning to get around to for a few years now.
One of Almodovars best. This film builds beautifully and cares for its unusual characters. While early in his career Almodovar was very referential, this cements the assured style he had started with All About My Mother.
Looking back, this movie was a gamble. It features some of the most kitsch and risque moments of his career to date, a focus on male loneliness and longing, false relationships, and some of that soap opera-like melodrama. But he pulls it off and turns it into art. The centrepiece here is the character of Benigno. Benigno is an obsessive and deluded psychopathic stalker and…
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Talk to Her is one of the crowning achievements of Pedro Almodovar's career, earning him an Oscar nomination for Best Director and a win for Best Original Screenplay for his work on it. Following the story of two men who develop a friendship while caring for the women they love, who happen to be in comas, Almodovar weaves an impressive story of his trademark themes. Focusing on elements of femininity, love, morality and, as always, providing a deep atmosphere of sensuality, Talk to Her is everything that you could hope to expect from one of the most praised works of one of our finest modern filmmakers.
As is often the case with his output, Talk to Her's plot can at…
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The second and greatest film in what I like to refer to as Pedro's Trans-Gender trilogy. With All About My Mother you begin with an incapacitated/dead male and continue with a story that is almost exclusively female. With Talk To Her this is reversed and it is the females who are incapacitated for a male story. With Bad Education, you are dealing exclusively with male characters.
This film is a beautiful and touching exploration of loneliness. All power to Pedro for being able to make sympathetic a character who has done despicable things. The implementation of the silent film sequence is a thing of great beauty as is the fact that The Academy chose to honor this film with Best Original Screenplay. Oh and the dance sequences too. So much beauty in this film. Even midst the darkness.
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Glad I finally saw this...my husband has been trying to get me to watch it since we started dating seven years ago and for some reason we just now got around to it. A very sad story of lonely people...the colors are gorgeous, the dancing incorporated into the story was sublime (need to see Pina now!), and I loved everything about it. Beautiful.
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This was my first Almodovar film. Is every Almodovar film as good as this one?
Whew.
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NOTE: This review was written for a Film Studies A2 homework. So please excuse the fact that this review is well penned. Weird, I know.
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'Talk To Her', or 'Hable Con Ella' to give the film it's native
Spanish title, is a complex affair, complete with trademark
Amoldóvar hidden narrative threads, a focus on viewing others
and the female form. After Benigno Martin (Javier Camara) and
Marco Zuluaga (Dario Grandinetti) cross paths at a dance recital,
their lives begin to intertwine as their respective 'other halves',
Alicia (Leonor Watling), a comatose dancer and Lydia (Rosario Flores), a professional bull fighter on the run from her former life with matador Nino de Valencia. Numerous twists and turns bring the two… -
When his girlfriend (Rosario Flores) is injured in a bull fight and lapses into a coma, Marco (Dario Grandinetti) begins spending time at her side in the hospital. There he meets Benigno (Javier Camara) who is watching over his beloved Alicia (Leonor Watling), also in a coma. Pedro Almodovar (All About My Mother, Volver) directs this story of the nature of love, the bonds that cannot be broken, and the perversities that our feelings can drive us to. Talk To Her never shies away from the truth, whether that truth be heartbreaking, horrifying or ultimately enlightening.
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There's only 2 things I remember about this movie: 1) bullfighting is involved, and 2) the scene where a tiny man crawls into a woman's vagina. You don't see that everyday.
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Marco Zuluaga (Dario Grandinetti) is a writer doing a piece on the bullfighter Lydia González (Rosario Flores). Though each struggles to get over a past romance, they fall in love. And then she is gored in the ring and falls into the coma. In the same ward of the hospital, Benigno Martin (Javier Cámara) is a nurse for another coma patient: Alicia (Leonor Watling). Benigno was in love with her before her accident, but he loved her from a distance. Now he cares for her tenderly. The two men become friends, as Benigno tries to teach Marco how to care for and love Lydia. But love can go too far.
I probably don’t need to outline the plot of Talk…
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I will openly admit that I don't have much knowledge when it comes to world cinema. But my oh my, Pedro Almodovar's Talk to Her is a gorgeous film.
There is no way to describe the plot to do this film justice, so I'll simply say that it revolves around two men and the unconventional relationships they have with the women they love. And from the opening scene, where we see our male protagonists, Benigno (Javier Camara) and Marco (Dario Grandinetti), together at a dance performance - at this point still strangers - I was hooked. And from there, an impossibly complex and morally nuanced story unfolds.
There is a lyricism to Almodovar's storytelling here that is just beautiful. It…
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A male nurse and a journalist develop a friendship under strange circumstances. They both meet in a hospital while caring for the women in their lives for whom they have the most affection who happen to both be in a coma. A complex and mature film about love and forgiveness.