If Conversation Be the Food of Love, Talk On

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

Talk to her is not just a title. to Pedro Almodovar, the film's brilliant writer-director, it is a command, an imperative. To this delightfully voluble man, conversation is love's music, its best rationale and possibly its most haunting residue.

But in this great, profoundly witty and unique movie, he has placed what seems to be an insuperable barrier to love's songs, sighs and whispers: the two women at the heart of the film are in a coma, thereby rendered silent, impervious to anything their lovers, hovering in their hospital rooms, might say.

This is of no consequence to Benigno (Javier Camara). Sexually innocent, he learned caregiving by tending his invalid mother. He has transferred his skills and affections to Alicia (Leonor Watling), a ballet dancer struck down in an auto accident. He scarcely knows her. He fell in love with her from afar and exchanged only a few words with her as he quietly stalked her when she was still vital. Now he chatters endlessly to her--mostly about music, plays and movies, including an erotic silent film, brilliantly concocted by Almodovar, in which a tiny, shrunken man is seen traversing the nude body of the lover who shrank him.

Marco (Dario Grandinetti), Talk to Her's other bereft male, is Benigno's opposite. He's a journalist who has fallen in love with a subject, a female matador named Lydia (Rosario Flores). Before her bullring goring, their relationship was the reverse of Benigno and Alicia's--relentlessly, often tormentedly verbal, because each was still emotionally involved with a previous lover. But now Marco sits mute and helpless by Lydia's bedside, articulating his pain only to his new friend Benigno.

Up to this point, the movie's message is clear--a variation on E.M. Forster's famous dictum "Only connect." Now, though, Almodovar raises the stakes. The silent movie turns out to be the symbolic heart of the film. While we are transfixed by its hilarious transgressiveness, Benigno commits a real transgression: he makes love to helpless Alicia--and impregnates her.

Escandalo. Contempt. Prison. But also, for Alicia, a miracle--a birth and, yes, a rebirth. For us in the audience, there is nothing but bliss as we acknowledge the perfect dramatic balance Almodovar has achieved between his characters' states of being--between hope and fatalism, action and passivity, speech and silence.

Stasis is always a danger when the emotional forces of a film are so neatly measured out. But formalism is a beginning, not an end, for Almodovar. For his sensibility is shaped by Spanish Surrealism and giddily influenced by his love for the sober-delirious improbabilities of old-fashioned American movie genres. He offers this rich blend, he says, "in the most natural presentation possible: dreams without any change in lighting." In short, his is a cinema wildly alive to unsettling juxtapositions and strange coincidences, at once true to the banalities of life as we generally see them yet even truer to the more fantastic lives we live inside our minds.

It is also an accurate reflection of his own nature. At 52, Almodovar has a face that remains round, open, boyish, surmounted--almost contradicted--by spiky Bride of Frankenstein hair. He talks in a rush of movie references, psychological speculation and social observation, delighted by his own wise-child spontaneity, bemused by his fame.

The director is Spain's most admired artist. "He can't go anywhere anymore in Spain--he's mobbed, he's like the Beatles," says Geraldine Chaplin, who plays a supporting role in the film. Chaplin fears not for his life but for his sensibility, lonely in the distracting crowd. Almodovar disagrees. "I live as closely as possible to the way I've always lived," he says, but he acknowledges that this is not easy. The character in Talk to Her he identifies with is not the bustling Benigno but Lydia, the bullfighter: "The relationship between the bull and the matador--it's full of intuitions. Each knows how the other feels; it is very mysterious. A director is similarly isolated, surrounded by a crowd in the middle of an arena. Nobody knows what's happening between him and the movie he's making."

But there's a difference: a bullfight ritualizes death. Talk to Her, almost certainly the year's best movie, affirms life in all its ambiguity and complexity, briefly banishing death even while contemplating it.