MUBI

“Love is the saddest thing when it goes away,” Marco—one of the central characters in “Talk to Her”—reflects achingly, quoting a song by Antonio Carlos Jobim. Marco (Darío Grandinetti) is an Argentine writer with a delicate soul, a man whose quiet masculinity is softened by the subtle weeping that overcomes him in moments of longing and remembrance. It is during one such teary moment, at a play in Madrid, that Benigno—the film’s other central character—first encounters Marco. Benigno (Javier Cámara), a male nurse and apparent homosexual, is moved by Marco’s tears. Both men, it turns out, know the sadness—and loneliness—that fills the heart after love leaves.

By the time he sees Marco at the theatre, however, Benigno has already found a new love object to worship. After caring for his sick mother during most of his adolescence, Benigno is granted care of Alicia (Leonor Watling), a beautiful coma patient and former dancer for whom he dotes on as he did for his mother. Benigno’s own mother was very beautiful, or so he tells Alicia’s psychiatrist father during a doctor’s visit prior to Alicia’s accident. Just as Benigno maintained his mother’s good looks as her insides wasted away, he preserves Alicia’s appearance while caring for her physical health.

When Benigno and Marco meet again several months later, Marco has found love in the form of a female bullfighter named Lydia—and watched her goring in the corrida. With her face bruised and scarred, Lydia (Rosario Flores) arrives in Benigno’s clinic in a vegetative state equal to Alicia’s. Beyond their similar diagnoses, both women had a gift for graceful movement. We see only glimpses of Alicia’s ballet dancing in flashbacks, but Almodóvar photographs Lydia’s bullfights lovingly enough for us to draw the parallel. Whether through bullfighting or Pina Bausch’s choreography, dance—in a larger sense—infuses “Talk to Her” the way acting permeated “All About My Mother”; it shapes both the characters and the tragedy.

Though love begins for Benigno after Alicia’s accident, it ends for Marco soon after Lydia’s. To the discomfort of Marco and others, Benigno is content with his one-sided relationship with Alicia, if only because it parallels the relationship he had with his mother before she died. Marco, however, can’t attend to Lydia the way Benigno thinks he should. He can’t “talk to her” because, in reality, the couple had difficulty communicating even before Lydia was in a coma. Their relationship worked best when Marco could protect her—from snakes and from her former lover, El Niño—the way he protected his previous lover. His role is that of a savior—even if he ultimately fails to save the women he loves.

Early on in the film, when Marco tells Lydia about the lover he lost, she asks him if he’s single. “I’m alone,” he replies, emphasizing the difference between being without a partner and being truly alone. Benigno, too, makes the distinction when Alicia’s father asks him if he has a partner. “I’m not alone anymore,” he tells the girl’s father, not daring to tell the whole truth. Benigno doesn’t have a real partner, but he has found “someone” in Alicia. And though the love that eventually grows between Marco and Benigno is platonic, it’s extremely powerful nonetheless. For when things take a disturbing turn, loyalty prevails—and proves that neither of the two men is alone anymore.