Talk to Her

Two men sit next to each other at a dance performance, and one of them cries. Later they meet again in a private clinic. Benigno is a nurse who has spent years devotedly caring for Alicia, a young dancer in a coma. He talks to her, washes her, tells her about the films he sees. Marco is a journalist whose lover, a female bullfighter, has also fallen into a coma after a goring. Marco cannot even touch her. Benigno tells him: talk to her. A strange friendship grows between them.

Pedro Almodóvar made one of his most daring and beautiful films here. It is full of art: dance by Pina Bausch, Caetano Veloso singing "Cucurrucucú paloma", and a short silent film inside the film that is funny, surreal, and a key to what is really happening. The colours, the music and the structure, moving between past and present, are all perfectly controlled. Javier Cámara is extraordinary as Benigno, sweet and devoted, and something more disturbing as the film goes on.

It is a film about loneliness and about love that crosses lines it should not cross. Almodóvar does not judge, and that is what makes it so uncomfortable and so moving. It won the Oscar for Best Original Screenplay. A strange, delicate, unforgettable film. Almodóvar at his peak.