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. The tenderness reads as real, not as an act put on for anybody.
Payoff: The film wants you to feel his warmth fully, so notice how you respond to him.
The 4 rewatch keys open on this page when you choose "Seen it?".
Carry this in: Almodóvar keeps you looking at people who cannot look back. Notice what your own attention is doing.