"Talk to Her"

I watched another Almodovar movie yesterday (now that I'm an Almodovar-addict I can't help it!), Hable con Ella (2002). Well... What can I say about this movie, unless that I fell in love with the concept of love depicted there: A desire for becoming one, eternally uniting with the beloved.

I'm sure a lot of nice reviews have been written about this movie, specially concerning the scene of classical/Freudian desire for returning to the womb, a primitive urge to get back to the origin of life, to a time before us getting born. That would fairly explain the notion of heterosexual love and the mechanism of falling in love, as classical psychology suggests it: a man would unconsciously feel attracted to a woman who is like his mother, and who is totally unlike his mother. Paradoxical, but true. The traditional saying that good sons make good husbands has a root in human psychology: we can love the opposite sex only when we have practiced it as a child in our intimate relationship with our opposite-sex parent. And, in Almodovar movies, mothers are every where, though like shadows, we just see them or hear them briefly, they always end up functioning beyond their traditional roles.

Also, I interpret Lydia's fear of snakes as a symbolic fear of sexuality (snake standing for phallus in both Freudian psychoanalysis and the psychosexual interpretations of the Book of Genesis), so in a sense, Lydia is Benigno's counterpoint: while Benigno is a woman-like man, Lydia is a man-like woman; Benigno can relate to his mother and ends up knowing women and falling in love with a woman. Lydia, on the other hand, tries to relate to her father, though not totally successfully, and ends up being a bullfighter. Since her relationship with her father does not turn out to be as perfect as Benigno's relationship with his mother, Lydia ends up not being able to love men in a consistent and stable way (look at her troubled relationship with the other guy).

The same way, Marco and Alicia are counterparts (and that's why there is a spark of hope at the final sequence for them to join each other): Marco can cry easily and Alicia is a dancer. Both are more into emotions than into words. In spite of the talkative Benigno, and Lydia who, at one particular scene, mentions to Marco that she needs to "talk" to him, Marco and Alicia do not talk a lot. They look at each other a lot and they communicate through their eyes, instead. All and all, I can say these four people have a lot to share.

Another perspective would be: Hable con Ella is about women, and the men who fall in love with them. It is also about men who connect to each other through women. Furthermore, it is about the mechanism of love and the contrast between the social and the personal.

I again enjoyed watching a good movie from Almodovar.