The two male protagonist characters in Talk to Her are the nurse, Benigno, and the journalist and travelling novelist, Marco. They sit next to each other, watching a dance performance when the movie begins, but they are strangers. Later, a bull attacks Lydia, a bullfighter who is Marco's lover. She is taken to a hospital where Benigno works as a nurse while in a coma. His responsibility is to care for ballerina Alicia, who, like Lydia, is in a coma following a car accident.
The two men dedicate their lives to caring for brain-damaged and comatose women, and as a result, the movie builds a parallel protagonist structure. The film focuses on their odd connection and the slow discovery of Benigno's terrible fixation with his patient, with whom he is in love. Marco serves as the film's mediator. While Lydia passes away, it is revealed that Alicia is pregnant and that Benigno raped her. Benigno is never informed in prison that the woman miraculously healed after giving birth to a dead child, and he commits suicide in the end. Benigno writes in his suicide letter that he wants to pass away so he can reunite with Alicia once more.
When an immoral action can benefit a person in some way, it will push that person in a different path and be sufficient to alter the trajectory of their life. Sometimes, emotion takes the lead instead of reason in this direction. There is frequently a sense of the metaphysical because of the uncertainty and unknown in this direction.
Political dictatorship and religious asceticism gave rise to magical realism, surrealism, and mysticism in the Spanish cultural world before filmmaker Pedro Almodóvar - as well as in Latin American culture as a whole. It was in this social setting that Picasso, Dali, and Gaud all emerged. Almodóvar is different in that, even though his aesthetic preferences are associated with postmodern aesthetics, the core of his narrative is the recreation of the genuine emotions of marginal characters, and the marginal characters in his work use their emotions as weapons to challenge authority, allowing us to observe their tenacious vitality.
In "Talk to Her," marginalized characters save people in the middle class from themselves. Emotions, by their nature, have nothing to do with morality or the law, and Almodóvar wants to convey the vitality of marginalized groups through the emotional strength they possess outside of the moral bounds of the middle class. These forces are what the middle class, which "patriarchy" suppresses, lacks.
I don't mean to imply that morality has no significance at all. Alicia's rape does pose a dilemma for our sympathy for Benigno. It occurs in the middle of the movie, which is meant to emphasize its significance in terms of narrative structure. But rape is never seen. It can only be described analogically and in terms of its beneficial effects, such as causing Alicia to recover and awaken from her coma. It produces a dichotomy because the movie makes us feel sympathy for Benigno and a lack of empathy for him. The picture is engaging because of its balance. People wouldn't watch a two-hour movie on a platonic lover or a straightforward rapist. But the mixture introduces a turn.
Melodrama is a dramatic genre that enables moral dilemmas in the post-sacred age. In most of his works, including Talk to Her, Almodóvar employs it for another reason: to transcend moral disputes between the protagonist and antagonist characters by using beefy emotions like sentimentalism and love, both of which can pursue poetic justice at a level above good or bad. This film has a religious appearance and a romantic odour, yet it tastes more like a celebration of film art.
Plato was probably correct when he said that art cause us to see things differently than our moral standards would. On the other hand, one of his flaws was failing to see this as a potentially eye-opening opportunity for an audience gathered to be entertained by art and popular fiction.
Melodrama is frequently thought to be a genre concerned with moral issues. Pedro Almodovar's films are no exception. Some of his more intriguing films defy common morality standards while still becoming morality stories. Talk to Her is an art film as well as a melodrama. "Talk to Her" - like most of Almodovar's films, combines mainstream narration with excessive twists, particularly in its orchestration of extreme dramatic characters. Despite the character acts in ways cannot be justified by common moral standards, human emotional engagement and positive attitude toward the central characters established.
I'm curious about how and what extent questions of empathy and morality are related, if at all. Is it possible to not only relate to it but also sympathize or identify with someone who is not only wrong, but seriously wrong? Can we forgive someone who has raped someone else? Is it even possible to feel that we did the right thing? Talk to Her appears to imply this in some ways.
Beata Wilczek
8:15 PM
Thursday, January 12, 2023
Time in Berlin, Germany
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