BALDLY stated, Pedro Almodovar’s new film, “Talk to Her,” is about a crime committed against a comatose woman.
But the enfant terrible of Spanish cinema says it would be “a betrayal of the movie” to describe it as such.
Fans have come to expect the unexpected from Almodovar, whose baroque oeuvre is distinguished by florid surrealism, eccentric characters and scandalous conduct – and he doesn’t disappoint with “Talk to Her.”
Taking an unforeseen U-turn after last year’s Oscar-winning “All About My Mother,” Almodovar rises above the tawdry-sounding synopsis to deliver his most intimate, mature movie to date.
“I couldn’t really explain in such a few words the movie,” Almodovar told The Post during a recent trip to New York. “The important thing of this movie is something that belongs to me, which is the tone of the movie, something between the lines of the script.”
Almodovar is justly celebrated as being a brilliant director of women, but his latest movie focuses on two deep, sentimental men who forge a friendship over their love for two women in comas.
Marco (Dario Grandinetti) is a writer whose bullfighter girlfriend Lydia (Rosario Flores) lies in a vegetative state in a private clinic after being gored by a bull. Benigno (Javier Camara), a nurse at that clinic, is infatuated with a comatose ballet dancer (Leonor Watling) under his care.
The character of Benigno is one of Almodovar’s most fascinating creations – and one he feels a special attachment to.
“Probably, a psychiatrist would say he is a psychopath, and probably he is,” Almodovar says.
“You’d think a movie featuring a character like this would also have to be a thriller or a horror movie, yet I wanted to make a completely different type of movie, more lyrical, almost slightly floating above the ground.
“I wanted people to feel sorry for this poor man who is behaving in a way that, some might say, he commits a crime.
“But he is very coherent – he is trying to look for this lady in the darkness.”
Almodovar, whose work stands out in a sea of retreads and special-effects extravaganzas, says that after last year’s Oscar win, he felt the inevitable pressure to “go Hollywood.”
“But I have seen my counterparts do it, and they make an English-language movie with Jack Nicholson and Meryl Streep, but they make a bad movie,” he says.
“I thought about it for a few hours,” he adds.
True to form, he took the opposite tack.
“[The Oscar] allowed me the luxury of being more risky, more independent and more myself than ever,” he says. “This more intimate place is where I want to be now.”