...aspect ourselves?

P. L. Travers, About the Sleeping Beauty

But when ultimately you find yourself welling with tears of sympathy for an alleged rapist, you realise what a master filmmaker Almodovar is.

"Amazon.ukReview"

Given the traumatic nature of some of its scenes, it is surprising that arguably the most successful film to date by Spanish director Pedro Almodovar, far from provoking indignation, has met with almost universal critical and popular acclaim, including an Academy Award in the United States for best screenplay. The notion that a director might evoke audience sympathy for a rapist, even among female viewers, seems rather implausible. To fully appreciate this achievement, we must understand how Almodovar's use of narrative devices from fairy tales makes the story work. Were it not for the fact that the story is built on a fairy tale, with its corresponding dividing line between the real world and the world of fantasy, it would be impossible to swallow without feeling repulsed by its underlying significance.

Not surprisingly, the movie encountered strong criticism for its uses of female bodies and traditional symbolism, particularly in Spain. (1) Writer and film critic Pilar Aguilar rejected Almodovar's depiction of women, asserting that this movie was an expression of how little the director liked women and a repetition of his use of them for purely selfish and manipulative reasons. More importantly, she refused to consider him, or this movie, subversive in any way, unlike, say, Cuban writer Guillermo Cabrera Infante ("Homenaje"). But not all women felt the same way. Colombian journalist Gabriela Castellanos Llanos "forgave" Almodovar his happy ending and his treatment of women, instead choosing to privilege the social criticism implied in the movie and its formal perfection. I mention this particular exchange because it helps us to understand how complex this movie is in terms of gender, how we need to be careful in teasing out its different meanings, and why some critics felt compelled to overlook things they would otherwise reject.

In the present essay I will show how Talk to Her both exploits and reinvents traditional fairy-tale narratives with a view toward testing the bounds of the distinctions between the emotional and the rational, between moral and amoral. I will attempt to demonstrate how the film employs fairy-tale strategies in critiquing a contemporary society beset by dehumanization and alienation. But as we shall see, in making his case the director imposes a misogynist conception of gender that must be analyzed with extreme care. In the very act of subverting relationships between men by reinventing the fairy tale, he re-creates utterly traditional female characters.

This tension between reinvention and recapitulation is not unique to Almodovar. As A. S. Byatt has pointed out, "these stories are riddles," and they "accept and resist change simultaneously" ("Ice" 83). In what follows I will show how Almodovar reinvents this genre and what it reveals about his critique of contemporary male life, framed between the failure of both capitalism and socialism to provide channels of communication between society and the individual. I argue that the Spanish director plays with fairy tales just as Byatt does in the creation of her own tales. She calls her fairy stories "postmodern, in that they reflect on the nature of narrative, and of their own narrative in particular. Narration is seen as the goal as well as the medium--the heroines tend to be narrators," and the same could be said of Almodovar's movie ("Fairy Stories"). We might describe Talk to Her as a "complex" fairy tale that, as Elizabeth Harries writes, works "to reveal the stories behind other stories, the unvoiced possibilities that tell a different tale" (17). Talk to Her as a Fairy Tale

I was interested in making the character of these women be as

alive and expressive as if they were standing up and talking.

Almodovar, "Self-Interview" Leonor Watling is wonderful playing the sleeping beauty in the "El Bosque" clinic. Her motionless body is so expressive and so moving! Anyone who thinks simulating a coma is easy is mistaken. Almodovar, Talk to Her Talk to Her tells the parallel story of two men supposedly in love with women who are in comas. Marco is the successful, masculine, bourgeois man of our time, always traveling and on the run. Benigno is an immature, alienated man living in a fantasy world who has been left behind by a reality that he cannot grasp. He has spent all his life taking care of his mother, his family life more reminiscent of Francoist days than of contemporary Spain. Marco falls in love with Lydia, a female bullfighter gored by a bull in what can be seen as a suicidal move; Benigno is obsessed with Alicia, a beautiful dancer whom he barely knew before the accident that left her in a vegetative state. Delineated in a very structured way, the relationships between these four characters are what make the narrative of the movie. The relationship between Benigno and Alicia is particularly crucial, as we will see. She is the sleeping beauty of the story, the body around which the plot revolves.

The resemblance between the female lead, Alicia, and her counterpart in Giambattista Basile's "Sole, Luna, e Talia," as well as other stories in Lo cunto de li cunti (1634-36), should be immediately apparent. The sleeping beauty who is raped and, in the process, liberated from her enchanted sleep is common to both stories. This is not the first time Almodovar has employed a fairy-tale narrative. As Guillermo Cabrera Infante notes in a review of The Flower of My Secret that was published in El Pais, the genre was used in this earlier movie also, and with similar intentions ("El Indiscreto"). The same writer, in his review of Talk to Her, insists on the importance of the fairy-tale genre in this movie, and in Almodovar in general, noticing that the character of Alicia is living the "sleeping death" typical of these stories ("Homenaje").

Walter Benjamin has explained that the capacity to tell stories, to "exchange experience," is one of the crucial victims of modernity. "Familiar though this may be to us, the storyteller in his living immediacy is by no means a present force. He has already become something remote from us and something that is getting even more distant" (83). According to Benjamin, in modern societies "it is no longer intelligence coming from afar" that gets "the readiest hearing" but rather the information "which supplies a handle for what is nearest" (89). In this sense, recovering the storyteller requires an attempt to rehumanize an alienating modernity that has lost its capacity for enchantment. Almodovar's chosen subject--the conflicts surrounding dehumanization and solitude--suggests exactly the same type of criticism, and for this reason the fairy-tale genre, so close to orality and thus to the recuperation of a sense of community, is crucial to his own storytelling. As such we might consider Almodovar the storyteller in Benjamin's sense of the word: "he is the man who could let the wick of his life be consumed completely by the gentle flame of his story" (109).

In "Fairy Stories," Byatt asserts that fairy stones are "related to dreams, which are maybe most people's first experience of unreal narrative, and to myths." For this reason, the fairy-tale genre is an ideal social mirror, because it "is a wonderful, versatile hybrid form, which draws on primitive apprehensions and narrative motifs, and then uses them to think consciously about human beings in the world." In this sense, the fairy tale "gives form and coherence to formless fears, dreads and desires. Recognizing a fairy tale motif, or an ancient myth, Cinderella or Oedipus, in the mess of a life lived or observed gives both pleasure and security and the sense--or illusion--of wisdom."

The world of Talk to Her is a modern transposition of the traditional fairytale landscape. For Max Luthi, this landscape is structured "by the basic framing tension (Rahmen-Spannung) Lack/Striving for remedy" and by "the linking tensions (Binnenspannungen) Prohibition/Violation" (The Fairytale 56). Similarly, this movie is set in that mysterious universe to which women may go (the place of lacking) but to which men have no access (the place of prohibition). We thus find the female protagonists of this fairy tale living in a clinic named El Bosque ("The Forest"), with Alicia laboring under a fairy-tale enchantment. In this respect, the movie follows the traditional fairy-tale genre quite closely. In order to narrate the loss of orality/communication/enchantment in a contemporary world transformed by the triumph of capitalism (and the failure of fairer alternatives, such as socialism), the use of the female body becomes essential. All of the four main characters are either "modern," profiting from the elimination of social restrictions and the globalization of the world, or else represent "traditional" values and are left behind as if asleep.

The diminished importance of feminine rationality is a factor in the majority of fairy tales, origin myths, and heroic narratives. Jack Zipes has explained the importance of controlling the femine in such accounts (Fairy Tales). Almodovar is well aware of this, and consequently in this film the female characters follow a traditional gendered fairy-tale narrative. In this context, according to Luthi, we find stories in which "the feminine component, that part of man closer to nature, had to come to the forefront to compensate for the technological and economic spirit created by the masculine spirit, which dominated the external world of reality" (Once upon a Time 136).

References to fairies, the forest, and the mysteries of feminine nature abound from the outset. The film opens with a ballet in which the protagonists' world is metaphorically portrayed. It is the desolate world of men who have been abandoned by women, who remain forever inaccessible to them. (2) The somnambulist dancers are immediately assimilated to the comatose women. All four have succumbed to a mysterious condition in which they are trapped in an unknown realm, decipherable only by irrational forces.

The film's opening scene shows two men watching this ballet about solitude and alienation from two completely different perspectives. While one cries disconsolately, the other observes with frank curiosity both the feminine mystery embodied by the two ballerinas and the mystery of the crying man's behavior. This beginning is powerful not only because of the desolation of the ballet but also because it expresses the alienation of the two male characters, both of whom clearly yearn for some form of connection. In short order, Almodovar has shown viewers the core of his contemporary masculine universe, ravaged by the loss of femininity and the resulting solitude, alienation, and deprivation of both intimacy and communication. (3) This is the crux of Almodovar's social critique.

In the next scene, we leave the contemporary world behind and enter the world of fairy tales. And so we are introduced to the basic structure of the film, built on the contrast between the real world outside the clinic and...

NOTE: All illustrations and photos have been removed from this article.



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