Hable Con Ella (Talk to Her): Movie Review

Published in Romance by radicalatom, on May 9, 2009

Talk to Her tells a story about Marco, Alicia, Benigno and lydia where benigno happens to be a male nurse who takes care of alicia as she is in coma for four years and he loves her passionately. While Marco happens to be a reporter who falls for Lydia a bullfighter who too goes in coma during one of her fights and then how Marco and Benigno meet and form an unlikely bond forms the base of the story.

For the first time I could not feel the characters. Normally I try to take in a character within me so that I could feel its emotions and all the pain as the story unfolds but for some reasons while watching “talk to her” I felt numb even though it was for the second time I was watching it and I remember having a huge fight with my friend over what the story was trying to say.

Where it actually stirs is when benigno wants to complete his love by sleeping with alicia when she is in coma. When I watched it the first time I lost my mind for a while but now after multiple watching I can understand Almavodor’s take on love. Its all oddities are explained in such a beautiful manner that you actually start to feel sympathy for the characters, and this is one of the reasons why someone would go for multiple watching.

Spanish films have this highly abstract take on love and Almodóvar being a director who actually is gay gives his own take by creating benigno as someone who looks confused over his own sexual orientation and who displays emotions in a feminine manner which I must say is the reason why the film feels different. Talk to Her needs to be felt rather than thought about.