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COPYRIGHT 2002 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
From 1988, Pauline Kael reviews "Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown"
In a shiny Madrid clinic, Benigno (Javier Camara), a male nurse who is one of the two heroes of Pedro Almodovar's "Talk to Her," washes the body of a patient named Alicia (Leonor Watling). Slowly, patiently, he wraps her in layers of bedclothes, lacing her up like a deluxe package. A beautiful young ballet dancer who was struck by a car, Alicia has been in a coma for four years, and Benigno talks to her as he works, figuring she needs the company. Before he became a nurse, he took care of his mother the same way. "You have to pay attention to women," he says. A shy, slightly chubby young man, intelligent but unimaginative, he is trusted around the clinic, and trusted by Alicia's psychiatrist father, too, because he's a virgin--and, perhaps, a repressed homosexual--who would not take advantage of her. His gentleness, and the ritual washing of Alicia's limbs, suggests a devotion of religious intensity. The movie's second hero, Marco (Dario Grandinetti), who is an Argentine writer, meets a fierce, long-waisted female bullfighter named Lydia (Rosario Flores), and becomes her lover. Lydia is gored in the ring, and she, too, falls into a coma, but Marco doesn't talk...
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