Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch Talk to Her
2002 · Pedro Almodóvar · Talk to Her on Sightlines
5 things to watch and listen for on a first viewing, without spoilers, and 4 more once you have seen it. Each names something you can see or hear, the pattern it belongs to, and what noticing it gives you. How these keys work.
On a first viewing
Watch the man moving chairs out of the dancers' way. (staging)
The film opens on Pina Bausch's Café Müller, played almost in full. Two women with closed eyes walk into walls while a man clears the furniture ahead of them.
Payoff: Almodóvar states his whole situation in movement before any story starts. Two men in that audience are watching it alongside you.
Watch the hands washing, oiling, and turning a sleeping body. (camera)
Aguirresarobe holds these scenes long, patient, and often symmetrical, in calm creams and blues. No plot advances while they run. You are looking at a face that returns nothing.
Payoff: The act of looking at a sleeping woman becomes the film's real subject. Your own attention is part of what is being examined. In the reading: pure optical & sound situations. The reading calls these pure optical situations: moments where a person can only look, because no action is available.
Listen to Benigno talk to a woman who cannot answer. (staging)
He tells Alicia about films he has seen, the weather, nothing at all. Almodóvar stages the bed as a scene for two in which one chair is permanently empty.
Payoff: The title is his creed and the film's irony at once. The only talking available here is to someone who cannot reply.
Listen to Caetano Veloso sing at the garden gathering. (sound)
The story stops entirely for the performance. The camera drifts through the guests and finds Marco crying. Iglesias's strings do the same job elsewhere, tenderly, against unsettling material.
Payoff: Music carries what the men cannot say. Almodóvar reroutes feeling into song instead of letting a character explain himself.
Watch how gentle Benigno is in every single scene. (performance)
Cámara plays him attentive, childlike, and sincerely kind. He is never played as a predator. The tenderness is not an act he is putting on for anybody.
Payoff: Hold on to how you feel about him early. The film is going to ask you to account for it.
Once you have seen it
Watch where the film goes instead of showing the assault. (cutting)
Salcedo cuts entirely into The Shrinking Lover, a black-and-white silent pastiche, and returns only to the aftermath. The metaphor stands in for an act the camera never records.
Payoff: The withholding is the meaning. You are handed a fairy tale and left to understand what happened inside it. In the reading: crystalline-description. The reading calls this a crystalline description: an image that composes its own object and then replaces the thing itself.
Look at Alicia's face and what it expresses. (camera)
Watling spends most of the film unconscious, photographed with a devotional stillness. A close-up usually promises a feeling about to become an action. Here nothing ever discharges.
Payoff: Her face becomes a surface for other people's projections. The film makes that projection visible instead of hiding it. In the reading: icon of quality. The reading calls this a qualisign: a held face expressing one suspended quality rather than a passing feeling.
Track every body in the film arranged for viewing. (structure)
The dancer on stage, the bullfighter in the ring, two patients in beds, the giant woman of the silent film. Almodóvar keeps staging spectacle around a body that is being beheld.
Payoff: The pattern is the argument. Every kind of looking in this film is set beside every other kind and compared.
Watch Marco's reactions rather than Benigno's actions. (performance)
Grandinetti plays him with held-in grief and visible discomfort. He is the character standing closest to where you are sitting, and his reactions are the film's own.
Payoff: Marco is the surrogate for your unease. Where he lands is as close to a verdict as Almodóvar is willing to offer.
Carry this in: Almodóvar keeps you looking at people who cannot look back. Notice what your own attention is doing.