I blame it all on Thor. I remember it vividly, that Friday Night that I was supposed to watch Wings of Desire and hence be faithful to my fledgling blog-- but then disaster struck like a slick, overproduced lightning bolt and I was coaxed into watching yet another Hollywood Blockbuster that creates this unspoken "obligation" to watch it by its sheer production cost and hype.
Maybe it's because it broke a newly formed habit, or perhaps it's because exposing oneself to nicely packaged shallowness inevitably kills a few brain cells, but this led to an unintended hiatus for my little film viewing venture. Even when I tried watching Wings of Desire again, it felt weird to "go back" to black and white, quiet (if not completely silent) film classics. This is precisely what led to choosing Hable Con Ella. If I was to get myself out of this expressive 'coma', I thought, I needed a departure from the old classics to something more recent and edgy to jolt me back into writing.
By all accounts, this Almodóvar drama fit the bill- being one of only four films from the 21st century to make it on the '100 Greatest' list, as well as having decidedly atypical elements-- two parallel relationships, two men in love with women who are both in a Permanent Vegetative State, supposedly devoid of any higher brain functions like emotion or thought. One man, Marco, is a handsome journalist who falls in love with a female matador after writing a profile on her, the other, Benigno, is a pudgy nurse who sees a ballerina through the window of his apartment, and decides to, it would seem, stalk her to the point of becoming her personal nurse when she meets an accident and falls into a coma. The two meet and become friends at the hospital, where Benigno insists that Marco talk to his matador as if she could hear him.
It takes a stranger turn towards the end when Benigno ends up doing more than "talking" to his beloved and impregnates the unconscious woman. Soon after, the true tragedy is revealed when, after Benigno is imprisoned for his crime, the ballerina is awakened from her coma, while Marco's matador slips away into death.
Like a modern Greek tragedy, the power of this film lies in its masterful articulation of the otherwise most tired theme of them all and in its ability to make us question our own tired conceptions of Love. On the surface, it is the relationship between Marco and the Matador that most of us would feel 'should' work - both are attractive and successful, and more importantly, consciously get involved with each other, much like the matador facing the bull in a deadly dance that cannot be done alone. Even the 'death' of their love makes sense- woman falls into coma, man grieves, woman dies, end of story.
Yet in a twisted sense, it is Benigno's one-sided love affair with his ballerina that feels more honest and real. Others would call it obsession, perversion, even a criminal offense at one point, but none of that matters to him, precisely because he is consumed by his love, much like a ballerina dancing in the spotlight, unable to see her audience, his love just IS, quite literally asking for nothing in return. His story ends only with his own suicide, thinking that his ballerina had died, but otherwise I would venture to think that he would have waited out his sentence in peace- not as a prisoner but as 'lodger' as the Prison Clerk put it, not confined but instead sustained by his own love for her.
I chose to see Hable Con Ella precisely because it seemed like such a departure from previous selections, but in the end, all great movies inevitably share a common trait in their ability transcend the specifics of any character or setting (or language for that matter) and tap into universal themes like love, sex, death, or friendship-- it persists and is able to talk to any audience regardless of any seeming impediment. In stark contrast to movies like Thor, that make mucho dinero precisely because they stay within the dream, the comatose of themselves.
