"Talk to Her" is a film with many themes; it ranges in tone from a soap opera to a tragedy. One theme is that men can possess attributes usually described as feminine. They can devote their lives to a patient in a coma, they can live their emotional lives through someone else, they can gain deep satisfaction from bathing, tending, cleaning up, taking care. The bond that eventually unites the two men in "Talk to Her" is that they share these abilities. For much of the movie, what they have in common is that they wait by the bedsides of women who have suffered brain damage and are never expected to recover.
Marco meets Lydia (Rosario Flores) when she is at the height of her fame, the most famous female matador in Spain. Driving her home one night, he learns her secret: She is fearless about bulls, but paralyzingly frightened of snakes. After Marco catches a snake in her kitchen (we are reminded of Annie Hall's spider), she announces she will never be able to go back into that house again. Soon after, she is gored by a bull, and lingers in the twilight of a coma. Marco, who did not know her very well, paradoxically comes to know her better as he attends at her bedside.
Benigno has long been a nurse, and for years tended his dying mother. He first saw the ballerina Alicia (Leonor Watling) as she rehearsed in a studio across from his apartment. She is comatose after a traffic accident. He volunteers to take extra shifts and seems willing to spend 24 hours a day at her bedside. He is in love with her.
As the two men meet at the hospital and share their experiences, I was reminded of Julien and Cecelia, the characters in Francois Truffaut's film "The Green Room" (1978), based on the Henry James story "The Altar of the Dead." Julian builds a shrine to all of his loved ones who have died, fills it with photographs and possessions, and spends all of his time there with "my dead." When he falls in love with Cecelia, he offers her his most precious gift: He shares his dead with her. She gradually comes to understand that for him, they are more alive than she is.
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