Masterful melodrama
Pedro Almodovar, the one-time enfant terrible of the Spanish cinema, has matured into one of the most sublime voices on the international film scene, and in the process has become a great moralist. Who could have expected this from the director of such cult films as Dark Habits (1983), which features a heroin-addicted lesbian Mother Superior, or Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! (1989), about a mental patient's sado-masochistic relationship with a porn star?
Almodovar, 51, has always welcomed the fringe of society into his films, especially transvestites, transsexuals and others with a multifaceted sex life. (Almodovar is openly gay.) But after years of placing these rebels in black comedies or over-the-top sex farces, he began to work them into more subdued fare, such as The Flower of My Secret (1995), about a middle-aged female journalist facing a potential breakdown as she confronts marital problems with her soldier husband. Almodovar maintained the same serious posture in Live Flesh (1997), which is about a lonely man who falls in love with a crippled policeman's wife. The world took notice of his thematic change of heart when All About My Mother (1999) won an Oscar for best foreign film. It portrays the complex relationship between a vain actress and a woman whose son was killed while seeking the actress's autograph.
The strange but wonderful Talk to Her (Habla con Ella), Almodovar's fourth superior film in a row, does with male characters what All About My Mother does with women. It focuses on a series of relationships revolving around four main characters: Benigno, a chubby male nurse at a private rehabilitation clinic who has gained bedside experience caring for his ailing mother; Marco, a sensitive journalist and travel writer who is still recovering from a failed love affair with a young drug addict; Lydia, an insecure bullfighter who has grown weary of living in the shadow of her better-known toreador boyfriend; and Alicia, a shy former ballet student who is in a coma after a car accident.
