International Art House Classics: Talk To Her (2002)

Talk to Her centres on the developing friendship between two strangers standing vigil over comatose women: Marco (Darío Grandinetti), whose matador lover Lydia (Rosario Flores) was gored in a corrida; and Benigno (Javier Cámada), a young nurse who has fallen for Alicia (Leonor Watling), a beautiful dancer injured in a car accident. Finding rapport in their shared loneliness, the two men establish an unlikely intimacy. Even given its most audacious stylistic gambit — a surrealist silent film-within-the-film that features a shrunken man scaling the peaks of his naked lover — Talk to Her is a film of considerable restraint and delicate, beautifully wrought emotion; now viewed as one of the director’s finest achievements, it won Almodóvar the Oscar for Best Original Screenplay.

Directed by Pedro Almodóvar

2002 | Spain | Spanish language with English subtitles | DCP