There is an interesting feel in Pedro Almodovar's HABLE CON ELLA. The film starts and finishes in a theatre, and two characters who eventually meet and create a bond are sitting in close proximity of each other, moved by the drama playing itself on-stage. Javier Camera and Dario Grandinetti play Benigno and Marco. As TALK TO HER begins, they are both watching a play about two women, both mimicking each other's actions, both looking disheveled and with white night gowns. What neither of them know is that they will meet through the most unlikely of ways.

Javier is a loner, a man who lost his mother and has an ambiguous sexuality, who works as a nurse in a hospital. He spies at Alicia, a young dancer (played by Leonor Watling), and we see his desire. He bumps into her on the street, walks her home, and notices her father is a psychiatrist who consults from home. So he sets a session in which he sort of declares he is a homosexual, while Alicia takes a shower. Before he leaves he takes an object from her room, not before he bumps into a naked Alicia and makes up a flimsy excuse as to why he is there. However, he will lose her to an accident which will leave her in a coma.

Marco is a reporter assigned to interview the famous bullfighter Lydia (Rosario Flores) right at the moment she is going through some tough moments since her ex-boyfriend, another toreador called "El Nino de Valencia" (Adolfo Fernandez) has left her the object of media fodder. They become close, but a fateful match with a bull leaves Lydia also in a coma, hovering between life and death in the hospital where Benigno works and takes care of the also comatose Alicia. Marco, while taking care of Lydia, wonders if his interview could have broken her concentration and led to her situation.

It's here when Benigno and Marco meet, and their meeting becomes the fulcrum of HABLE CON ELLA. Benigno opens Marco to the idea that love needs not have a response to be true -- he confides his love for Alicia -- and one sequence is truly disturbing: Benigno's fantasy sequence in which a shrinking man penetrates his wife's vagina, shown in black and white, betrays what can amount to a pathology, and its eventual denouement, something I won't reveal, creates a series of events that accelerate both the moral of the story. Love sometimes can create actions we would deem as monstrous, even when we may not see them as such. Almodovar handles his risky material with incredible taste -- it is rare to see this kind of subject matter on screen -- but Almmodovar makes it seem natural even when at its core, such love can be frightening.

It would not be unexpected to come away conflicted about this movie. On the surface it's a moving story about personal relationships gone unrequited, but the tenor of the story takes a drastic turn when it's revealed that a comatose patient winds up pregnant by means of the male nurse assigned to her care. Told in turn via flashback and present day, an underlying message of maintaining hope in miracles is a good one, and Benigno Martin (Javier Cámara) is a sympathetic character, right up until the point he makes his admission to friend Marco (Darío Grandinetti). Up until that time, one feels there may have been some other hospital employee who might have used Benigno as cover for a horrific violation of the young woman in a coma. But it suddenly becomes a story of a perverse individual who no matter how he might have rationalized things, committed an act of bizarre consequence. I don't think it helped that the silent film clip of the 'shrinking lover' bordered on the pornographic with it's inclusion in the picture. And then, as icing on the cake as it were, the final scene suggests that Marco will soon take up with the former comatose patient Alicia (Leonor Watling). It was not revealed in the story whether or not Alicia was ever told about her stillborn baby, one would have to assume she became aware of it at some point. But to suggest that the two would somehow get together in a meaningful relationship is not a sequel I would particularly care to experience.

Marco Zuluaga is doing a story on female matador Lydia González. They fall in love. She gets gored by a bull and falls into a coma. As he cares for her, he befriends Benigno Martín at the clinic. Benigno is a nurse caring for Alicia, a dancer in a coma.

This movie follows two men in love with two women in comas. I find Marco problematic in that I don't feel his relationship with Lydia. She is thrown into coma before their chemistry is established. It's left to be built in flashbacks. His character is weirdly close to Benigno. It leads to a suspicion about the story. The character is just awkward in many ways. The movie almost loses me before it gets going.

Benigno is an odd obsessive creep. I would like more menace. I keep thinking that Almodóvar veteran Antonio Banderas would have created a more powerful character. There is only one major problem with the character. Without giving away the ending, I still have many questions about what happened at the hospital with the comatose dancer. It isn't completely spelled out. I think it needed to be spelled out. DNA test would help. A lot of things feel slightly off but Almodóvar's flamboyant sexual flair is ever present.