Ana Beatriz barros for elle 2002 January
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Talk to Her (Pedro Almodóvar, 2002)
Javier Cámara, Leonor Watling, Rosario Flores, and Dario Grandinetti in Talk to Her
Cast: Javier Cámara, Darío Grandinetti, Leonor Watling, Rosario Flores, Mariola Fuentes, Geraldine Chaplin, Pina Bausch, Malou Airaudo, Caetano Veloso, Roberto Álvarez. Screenplay: Pedro Almodóvar. Cinematography: Javier Aguirresarobe. Production design: Antxón Gómez. Film editing: José Salcedo. Music: Alberto Iglesias.
Pedro Almodóvar won a well-deserved Oscar for his screenplay – an award that’s rarely given to someone writing in a language other than English – and was nominated for best director for Talk to Her. It’s an extraordinarily challenging film – even for Almodóvar, who loves to challenge filmgoers – that works on several levels. First, it’s an absorbing narrative about liminal states: The protagonists, Benigno Martín (Javier Cámara) and Marco Zuluaga (Darío Grandinetti), are both in love with women who are in comas, unresponsive but undeniably still present, somewhere between life and death. Second, it’s a film about the boundaries between the sexes. At least two of the characters have jobs that are conventionally thought to be held by members of the opposite sex: Benigno is a nurse, and Lydia González (Rosario Flores) is a bullfighter, and each has encountered the stereotyping that labels them as anomalous. Benigno is easily stereotyped as gay: He studied nursing, cosmetology, and hairdressing so he could take care of his mother, with whom he lived until her death. And he is trusted with the intimate care of the beautiful, comatose Alicia (Leonor Watling) because he is thought to have no sexual interest in her. But Marco also has “feminine” characteristics: He cries easily, for one thing. In the first scene of the film, he is seen sitting next to Benigno at a performance of Pina Bausch’s Tanztheater piece, Café Müller, with tears rolling down his face. Benigno, who doesn’t yet know Marco, is moved but dry-eyed, and he recalls Marco’s tears later when he tells his fellow employees about the performance. Benigno and Marco finally meet after Lydia is gored by a bull and left in a coma. She is hospitalized just down the hall from Alicia, and Benigno advises Marco to talk to Lydia – advice he scorns because he’s been told that she’s brain-dead. Benigno, on the other hand, believes that Alicia listens to him and even mysteriously consoles him: He knows from an encounter with her before the accident that left her comatose that she was a dancer who loved traveling and silent movies, so he tells her about dance performances he attends, reads to her from travel guides, and describes the movies he sees. One of the movies is called The Shrinking Lover, and Almodóvar creates it for us: A female scientist (another gender-role switch) creates a potion that causes her lover to shrink, and in a final, Buñuelesque scene, we see the tiny lover’s body disappear into her enormous vagina. Shortly thereafter, Alicia is found to be pregnant, and although it’s never confirmed that Benigno raped her, he is sent to prison. The extraordinary thing about Talk to Her is that Almodóvar manages to keep all of the elements of his film in a delicate balance, so that even the absurd and surreal moments maintain plausibility, and the bittersweet ending feels integral to what has gone before. The tone of the film is lightly melancholy where it might have been crude and sensational, and it’s maintained by a lovely score by Alberto Iglesias and a beautiful sequence in which Caetano Veloso sings “Cucurrucucú Paloma,” about a man weeping for his lost lover, as a tearful Marco recalls his love for Lydia. The excellent performers also include Geraldine Chaplin as Alicia’s dance teacher.
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Ten (Abbas Kiarostami, 2002)
Mania Akbari in Ten
Cast: Mania Akbari, Amina Maher. Screenplay: Abbas Kiarostami. Cinematography: Abbas Kiarostami. Film editing: Vahid Ghazi, Abbas Kiarostami, Bahman Kiarostami. Music: Howard Blake.
Ten deals with a kind of mobile claustrophobia. We’ve all experienced it: the feeling that the automobile, which represented freedom when we were teenagers, has become a kind of cage, trapping us into the routines of commuting, carpooling, ferrying the kids to and from soccer practice and play dates, and so on. The feeling becomes more acute when we have a passenger whose conversation we can’t escape: There’s no place to run. In Abbas Kiarostami’s movie: the unnamed driver is an Iranian woman (Mania Akbari), for whom the car at least provides an element of freedom denied to women less mobile, but also traps her into conversations that often reflect upon the status of women – and not just women in Iran. We don’t even see her in the first and longest of the ten segments of the film: The camera is trained on her pre-teen son, Amin (Amina Maher, Akbari’s real-life son), as he berates her for divorcing his father and remarrying, and generally for nagging and correcting him. She responds in kind – each accuses the other of shouting – and bitterly explains that the reason she lied and said his father used drugs was that it was the only way she would be allowed to divorce him in their repressive society. We then see her behind the wheel in subsequent episodes. She drives her sister on a shopping trip and talks about their respective marriages. She picks up an elderly woman who is on her way to pray at a mosque, and learns that she goes to pray three times a day – a devotion that seems to inspire in the driver her own brief attempt at dealing with her problems in prayer. In the car one day, a friend removes her headscarf – an act forbidden in public and even in the movies – to reveal that she has shaved her head, thereby negating the proscription against removing her scarf. One night, she gives a ride to a prostitute who mistook her for a male driver and has a conversation with her about sex. The prostitute insists that what she does is no different from what the driver does when she sleeps with her husband for support and gifts: “You are wholesalers,” she says. “We are retailers.” Kiarostami filmed the driver and her passengers with digital dashboard cameras, so that we see only the one or the other at any given time. The only external shots are what we can see in the background as she drives – sometimes including the stares of other drivers or pedestrians – with one exception: Though we never see the prostitute’s face, we watch her get into another car after the driver drops her off. The film, edited down from many hours of footage, was mostly unscripted: Kiarostami provided the concept of each sequence and relied on the actors to improvise. Akbari, who has gone on to write and direct her own films, gives a remarkable performance, as does her son.
