Last night following my tux tailoring and dinner at Gaylord India Restaurant in the Embarcadero Center, Jen, Enoch, and I headed to the cinema to see the Spanish film that won the Oscar for Best Original Screenplay, Pedro Almodóvar‘s Talk to Her. I think it certainly deserved the Oscar.
Far From Heaven is the only one of the five nominated films that I’ve not yet seen. My Big Fat Greek Wedding and Y Tu Mamá También were both excellent films, but Gangs of New York wasn’t all that (unbelievable plot and character development, along with too much gratuitous violence).
According to the official synopsis, “Talk to Her is a film about the joy of narration and about words as a weapon against solitude, disease, death and madness. It is also a film about madness, about a type of madness so close to tenderness and common sense that it does not diverge from normality.”
The film is a colorful, funny, and disturbing story of two men, Benigno and Marco, who from the opening scene are connected by an unspoken passion about life and all its beauty. Though they do not initially meet, their lives later become intertwined, as each oversees a woman living in a coma (Benigno as Alicia’s nurse and Marco as Lydia’s lover) in the same hospital.
With many layers of characters, stories, and even the vivid examination of the life of a bullfighting woman, Talk to Her is about relationships, communication, and the bizarre journey into the heart of a man so sick with passion that it drives him to extremes. There is one black-and-white scene in the appropriately silent film within the film that you won’t soon forget. It’s simultaneously hilarious and sad as it personifies the emotions and grasps at the core of the being of the character watching it. (If you’ve seen the movie, I’m sure you know the one.)
