For what would appear to be his last presentation at movie night before leaving to begin his post-grad-school life (you’re always welcome back!), Jon decided to hook us up with our very first film from arguably the best-known Spanish director since Buñuel in Pedro Almodóvar‘s 2002 offering Hable con ella (“Talk To Her”). Without further ado, let’s talk about this film!
Why are you wearing that stupid man suit?
The film opens with an avant-garde dance performance. Opaque enough to me (not being, as a cheesy comestible-seeker might say, one who delights in all manifestations of the Terpsichorean muse [and, to be fair, those would be the other manifestations]), but evidently it is quite moving for a devastatingly handsome man by the name of Marco – he is moved to tears. And these tears make an impression on his coincidental seat-neighbor Benigno. As you might expect, they’ll meet again.
But it wasn’t a dream. It was a place. And you and you and you…and you were there.
In the meantime, we learn a bit about Benigno, who turns out to be a personal care nurse at the hospital El Bosque (“the forest”) whose charge is a beautiful but comatose young dancer by the name of Alicia. Though she is comatose, Benigno makes it a habit to go out to films and dance performances and to describe them to her, on the principle that a comatose patient may still be able to take in their surroundings. But the film decides that this is about enough about Benigno for now.
It’s Rump Roast Cancer Awareness Week!
We return instead to Marco, who we learn is a journalist and travel writer who has recently been given an interesting assignment – to write a story on Lydia, a rare female toreador. Lydia is on the rebound from a fellow toreador who goes by El Niño de Valencia, and who, it appears, rode Lydia’s sequinned coattails to the top, only to dump her when he made the big time. Medium-length story short, Marco and Lydia fall in love. But Lydia is severely injured in a bullfight and falls into a coma right before (we eventually learn) she was about to leave Marco to get back together with El Niño de Valencia.
Weekend At Benigno’s
And guess which hospital Lydia gets sent to: El Bosque. Marco, unaware of Lydia’s plans to leave him, is initially cowed by the prospects of coping with a comatose girlfriend, but Benigno, who recognizes him from their encounter at the theater, takes him under his experienced wing. They become friends, they have playdates with their respective sacks of potatoes, Benigno encourages Marco to “talk to her”, giving us a title, you know, the usual. Of course, it’s not doomed to last, because eventually El Niño shows up to claim his true love and Marco, now unwelcome, returns to his life.
Nicole? At the academy?!? Where are your brains, girl!?!
This allows us to look more closely into the relationship between Benigno and Alicia. It’s more complicated than a simple nurse-invalid thing. You see, it turns out that Benigno knew Alicia before she was his patient. Alicia, it turns out, studied dance at a studio across the street and a few floors below Benigno’s home, and he used to stand at the window and check her out while she was dancing, like a creeper.
Then, one day, even more like a creeper, he decides to screw up the courage to follow her home. Coincidentally she drops her wallet, allowing him to speak to her and, in classic creeper style, to insist upon walking her home. But no, it gets better! He finds that Alicia’s father is a well-to-do psychiatrist who runs his practice out of his residence. So, like a world-class stalker, he sets up a therapy appointment with Alicia’s dad, which gives him the opportunity to sneak around her house and check her out in the shower, and steal a hairclip from her room, and then accidentally bump into her trying to sneak out, which freaks her out appropriately.
But, she’s not destined to be freaked out any more, at least for the moment being, because she promptly gets hits by a car and falls into a coma. And guess who becomes her nurse? Oh wait, you don’t have to guess, you already know the answer.
They gave me a DNA test. I passed! At least, they said it was positive!
So, our sympathy for Benigno is already waning a bit. Then, the comatose Alicia turns up pregnant. Yeeeeaaaaaah. Guess who is suspect number one?
So anyway, while on travel assignment in (checks Wikipedia) Jordan, Marco learns that Lydia has succumbed to her coma. He calls the hospital to speak to Benigno, only to find that his old friend is in prison. Marco rushes home to deal with the situation, and takes several visits to Benigno at the prison, all while tracking down whatever happened to Alicia on behalf of his imprisoned buddy. It turns out that the delivery of a stillborn child shook Alicia out of her coma. But on the advice of Benigno’s lawyer, Marco declines to tell him about her recovery, and Benigno, stockpiling drugs from his work assignment at the prison pharmacy ODs with the intention of putting himself in a coma to join Alicia. He dies.
And then, as she is convalescing, Alicia and Marco meet coincidentally at the theater. The End.
Honestly, this is a fantastic film. It has its minor problems, as all films tend to, but the storytelling is great, the visuals are interesting and imaginative (sometimes perhaps a bit too imaginative, as in the case of the marginally pornographic black and white film that Benigno sees involving a tiny, scientifically-shrunken man and some giant pudenda), and the way that it turns the sympathetic character of Benigno slowly into a monster is fascinating to say the least. I’m going to give a full recommendation to this one.
That said, there are a few notes that don’t ring true, mostly involving the treatment of the rape followup. For one, despite being the prime suspect, Benigno is allowed to sit in on the meetings at the hospital discussing the situation, and like, seriously, there’s no way that happens. And a second bit is that Benigno seems to stick with his innocence, and Marco as well as at least one other hospital employee seem to believe him. Look, there’s an easy way to tell. We have the technology. And that seems to get ignored in order to leave a bit of ambiguity in the situation. In the real world, there’s no ambiguity, and maybe it’s hard to tell the story without it, but the presence of that ambiguity is jarring. Were the film set in 1902 instead of 2002, then totally understandable. And honestly, maybe it should have been set then. But it wasn’t, and that detracts from the film’s excellence a bit.
Cinema 1544: The As-Official-As-It-Gets Site 