I like Pedro Almodovar as a writer/director. Sure, I’ve not seen all his films, but the ones I have seen (All About my Mother, Live Flesh & Tie Me Up, Tie Me Down) I have enjoyed immensely. He has a great handle on relationships and how they affect different characters. In previous films (All About my Mother in particular) he concentrated on the female sides of relationships, in Talk to Her he delves into male relationships.

Of course in typical Almodovar fashion these are no ordinary relationships. Benigno tended for his mother hand and foot for 20 years, training to be a nurse to look after her. He learned to cut hair, to apply make-up. This was clearly not a normal adolescence. But, normality doesn’t really apply to Benigno. His current ‘relationship’ is with a comatose patient, with whom he has had what can only be called an obsession for several years. An obsession that as the film moves forward grows more and more worrying.

Javier Camara is wonderful as Benigno. His character has dark edges; he commits deeds that we should find far from sympathetic. But, through Almodovar’s writing and Camara’s performance we find ourselves feeling sorry for him. Especially in later scenes when we see what has become of him, we find ourselves caring for him in spite of ourselves.

Benigno also shares a relationship with Marco. It starts off through the connection of their comatose friends, but in the end runs much deeper. Homosexuality is hinted at, particularly from Benigno’s side, but it is never a realistic possibility. Marco sees Benigno as a friend only, someone to confide in when he cannot bring himself to talk to his comatose girlfriend. We feel sympathy for Marco because through flashbacks we learn that his past has been hard and his current situation is less then ideal.

The character I felt the least sympathy for was Marco’s girlfriend Lydia. She was a bullfighter which the Spaniards class as a sport. Sorry, but torturing an animal in public and letting it bleed to death while people shout and scream from stands is not a sport, it’s murder. From where I was sitting she got what she deserved. Alicia spends the majority of the movie flat on her back (and often naked), but she ends the film with a glimmer of hope that means when the credits roll you at least have a feeling that at least something good might have come from what happened.

Almodovar keeps things sprightly and moving along nicely, he often uses flashbacks to fill in the story and it works very well, feeding us the right information at the right time. He shoots a couple of ballet scenes very well and as always his writing is out of the top drawer, certainly worthy of the Oscar he picked up. The music in the film is amazing, it’s Spanish in flavour and fits the on screen happenings perfectly. There is one amazing scene when a band is playing live, it’s magnificent.

There is a fair bit of black humour to be found in the film. Not least within the ‘film in a film’, The Shrinking Lover. It’s a silent film that tells the tale of a young couple, when the man drinks a new diet potion he begins to shrink. Finally, well let’s say he’ll go to any lengths to satisfy his lover! It’s a surreal sequence, but it has resonance in terms of the real films storyline. Speaking of which, things do get a little weird and the film throws a couple of pretty shocking twists at the viewer.