the language of love

Last night, with Mlle B out at yet another sleepover, I watched a movie that's been sitting here costing me money for a couple of weeks. It's a movie I'd never seen before: Almodovar's Talk to Her.

Shocking I know, but it has taken me years to get Almodovar. I saw Women on the Edge of a Nervous Breakdown and thought it was kind of cute, but too brittle to really resonate. Last year I saw Volver in the cinema, and began to realise how shallow my assessment of Women on the Edge had been.

So last night I watched Talk to Her. This movie seems to me far more daring than either of the others. It's so subtle in its exploration of how we associate things, how we process feeling to action, that I feel I need to see it again. It obviously deals with many of the same things - aspects of the same issues, or issue - as the others, because Almodovar is clearly a man with something on his mind - but it seems to me to go deeper then they do, further inside.

And indeed its issues are all about what's inside us, and how it gets to the outside, and what form it takes when it gets there. And look at those pinks and oranges! Look how wonderfully not-quite-symmetrical that shot is.

The central character, Marco, is the emotional heart of the piece. I loved the way everything is really understated, but that his emotional reactions to things are showcased. His face is so impassive, but then a tear will roll down it. In that way it reminded me forcibly of Bergman's Magic Flute - which, I have to say, was tremendously influential on the young Baroquina, back in the day. This is a film that also dwells almost as much on the reaction of a spectator as on the action itself, for its subject.

The film even opens with a rather long contemporary ballet sequence, and then a shot of the audience. It's impossible, with the information we have so far been given, to read these things. We have no idea, as the tears form themselves in Marco's eyes, who he is.

The person sitting next to Marco in the theatre looks over at him, sees the tears, and is visibly taken aback by them. Or, no - interested. Curious. I laughed at this point, it was so delightful, but the point is we reinterpret that look several times throughout the film. As in life, the meaning accrues with knowledge and experience, and can be retrospectively adjusted.

Cinematically daring and beautiful, saturated colours, undulating countryside that looks like a woman's body, women's bodies looking like the countryside... The film leaves room for faces. Faces, faces, as in Bergman. How we communicate our feelings. Our expressions. The women who are in the comas, one is a dancer, the other is a bull-fighter: their expression was in how they moved their bodies, and even now the camera lingers on their faces, their expressions of perfect serenity.

The other main character, the wonderfully named Benigno, is presented to us by observation only, without all the tedious labellings many films would feel it necessary to make. In one scene someone calls him a "retard" and that is as close as we ever get to an official line on him.

It brings to mind the words of the novelist Elizabeth Bowen, when she said, "I will a tale unfold...", comparing it to taking a new frock out of its box.

Anyway, the film opens with a dance scene. The central scene is a long clip from a rather extraordinary silent movie Benigno has seen, which mirrors his own emotional state and drives him to the physical expression of his love for the comatose Alicia - a physical expression which is only, by the way, natural. And it ends with another dance, this one staged by Alicia's dance teacher, which also mirrors the concerns of the movie. Only where the movie started with Marco's tears, it ends with him smiling at Alicia as she sits two rows behind him. And by then, when you get it, the image of the rows of couples dancing slowly across the stage is spellbindingly poignant and beautiful. By then, Marco didn't need to be crying while he watched, because I was crying for him.

In the language of this film it's only Benigno's choice of a girl in a coma as the object of his affections, only his inability to realise how one-sided that is, that renders it not 'natural'. And Marco's acceptance of Benigno's feelings is implicit, even after the scene where they argue about it - obviously, because they are two sides of the same man, which is Almodovar. Ultimately the film almost asks the question of whether it even matters that a love has been reciprocated. Note: love, not just desire. Benigno has loved and cared for Alicia tenderly and devotedly for four years by the point where we meet him. By his own lights, they get along together like an old married couple. After Alicia wakes up she remembers nothing about him, and is herself unaware of having been touched in any way by him, either physically or emotionally. But she is happy and light as only a loved person can be.

This aspect of the film is so stylised that it reminded me of another movie, one I saw untold aeons ago - Bertrand Blier's equally unlikely, strange, funny, dangerous, and touching Préparer Vos Mouchoirs,* or Get Out Your Handerchiefs - but that is another story.

Sorry; this all feels very approximate to me. We have had the ultimate rainy Sunday here in Baroque Mansions.

* Gerard Depardieu's second film. I simply didn't know what had hit me.