Studying Talk to Her

Introduction

Talk to Her (Hable con Ella) (2002) is a vastly rich and interesting film, which begs to be analysed in depth. The film won the 2003 Oscar for best original screenplay and has been hailed as Almodóvar’s masterpiece.¹ The film offers much both in terms of thematic analysis and micro analysis of the sound, performance, cinematography, editing and mise-en-scène. Like most of Almodóvar’s films, little is clear cut; the characters are complex and our affinity and empathy for them shifts throughout the film.

Almodóvar is Spain’s most famous, prolific and celebrated contemporary director and any study of his films cannot be complete without considering the social context of Spain. In a style which has been referred to as postmodernist, Talk to Her’s Spain is a mongrel; a mix of the traditional and modern. Spanish guitars and bull fighting mingle with a hyper-real mishmash of 60s wallpaper, expressive dance and crass TV chat shows.

Almodóvar can be considered to be a director who is a specialist in gender and the issue of gender identity is explored in Talk to Her, particularly the notion that gender characteristics are fluid and not fixed. Almodóvar’s characters simultaneously embody and reject gender stereotypes and share both feminine and masculine attributes.

The film contains themes present within many of Almodóvar’s films such as loneliness, communication, the impossibility of a romantic relationship and psychology. Physicality and the body are central to Almodóvar’s films and particularly to Talk to Her; a film which explores both the active and passive body. Further to this, the issue of spectatorship is important in relation to how the body is presented to and interpreted by the spectator and how this gaze at times celebrates, sexualises, objectifies and medicalises the human form; especially the nude.

Almodóvar self-consciously both celebrates and rejects traditional genre and narrative conventions and as such, the film offers a rich opportunities for analysis in these frameworks. The film can be considered simultaneously both ‘genreless’ and rich with conventions from many genres. Almodóvar’s attitude to narrative structure is playful, winding backwards and forwards in time through the two relationships.

Most of all, what makes Talk to Her such an interesting film to dissect, is the uneasy position that Almodóvar places the spectator in and how its messages and values create moral ambiguity. The film delivers morally complex, hazy messages about rape, voyeurism and obsession and consequently, the spectator finds humour where they should find revulsion and sympathy where they should find anger. Our attitudes towards characters and events can change dramatically from first screening to close analysis. As a result, the film has sparked a great deal of critical, theoretical and philosophical analysis particularly around the issue of rape.

The film was generally well received by critics and audiences and there is an extensive amount of analysis of the film from a range of different perspectives from bloggers to philosophers, psychologists to dance/ performance theorists. The aim of this book is to bring together many of the interpretations and discourses surrounding the film in a readable and easy to digest way.

Just as the last lines of the film are ‘Nothing is simple’ so, too, the whole film can be thought of as complicated. However it is within the complexity of the film that one can find the most interest in the film. So much of the visual symbolism and the dialogue from the Oscar winning screenplay within the film is polysemic, and in this book I aim to suggest different interpretations rather than focusing on one argument or point of view.

One of the great things about studying Almodóvar’s films is that they are wide open to interpretation and, as the reader of this book, I hope that you will be able to form your own opinions on the messages, genre, narrative, characters and themes of Talk to Her as well as engaging with notions of auteurship, spectatorship and the Spanish historical and social context. As Almodóvar said:

One of the wonderful things about film is that it can be seen in a thousand different ways, all of them real. You have to be flexible with a movie and with life in general […] you have to be tolerant and you have to have a sense of humour, and you don’t have to accept things on face value.²

References

1.    www.rollingstone.com/movies/reviews/talk-to-her-20021105 (accessed 10/09/14)

2.    http://www.filmmakermagazine.com/archives/issues/spring1994/pedro.php#.VBCxAPldXwg (accessed 08/09/14)

Almodóvar as an Auteur

Paul Julian Smith refers to Almodóvar as ‘the one true auteur to emerge from the 80’s’¹ and Martin D’Lugo refers to him as ‘an undisputable international auteur’.² Auteur was a word first used in France in the 1960’s where writers of the film magazine Cahiers du Cinema coined the term to describe a growing number of directors whom they considered to have a signature style across several of their films. This signature could be in the form of a visual style through reoccurring motifs and techniques within the cinematography, mise-en-scène or editing or through sound, themes, representations, genre, narrative or the inclusion of similar characters. There seems to be overwhelming evidence to suggest that, across the nineteen feature films made up until 2013, Almodóvar has defining and reoccurring tropes in all of these categories.

Throughout the book, there will be constant reference to the qualities and characteristics of Talk to Her that adhere to Almodóvar’s auteur style, however it is important to understand where some of the qualities and characteristics of his work emerge from.

Almodóvar in Historical and Social Context

Almodóvar made his first appearance as a filmmaker in the late seventies during a period of immense cultural and political upheaval. However, the story of the Spanish film industry as a whole is equally turbulent.

While the early days of the moving image from the late nineteenth century up until 1935 were much the same in Spain as they were in the rest of Western Europe, the change from an agricultural society to an industrial one in Spain was slower. As a consequence, much of the early Spanish cinema industry centred around the cities of Madrid and Barcelona with film-makers such as Luis Buñuel (director of Viridiana (1961) - see the section on Rape in Spanish Cinema) finding artistic success. Many of the films of this early era were, as Jordan and Allinson note, involved in ‘recycling ‘Deep Spain’ i.e. films heavy in Spanish iconography, this early tradition may have been an influence on Almodóvar’s own ‘recycling’ of Spanish iconography in Talk to Her.³

As Sally Faulkner notes, the introduction of sound was ‘disastrous for this developing Spanish Cinema’⁴ with many film-makers moving to Hollywood to take part in this new emerging technology. Sound also posed a problem for European cinema more generally. With so many different languages in Europe, films were hard to export and share between different countries. In 1931 only one Spanish film was made as audiences turned to the technological spectacle of imported Hollywood sound cinema. Equally, the film industry was affected by the impact of the Great Depression upon the Spanish economy. In the mid 1930’s the industry had picked up again with film production companies like Filmófono and CIFESA beginning to make more Spanish films for Spanish audiences. This peak was short lived. The outbreak of civil war in 1936 saw a huge change in the film industry with film now being a powerful tool for political propaganda.

The Spanish Civil War, 1936-39, was fought between the Nationalists who supported General Francisco Franco (allied with the fascist regimes of Mussolini in Italy and Hitler in Germany) who believed in traditional values of religion, monarchy and preserving Spanish national identity, versus the Republicans (supported by France and Great Britain) who supported the democratically elected Spanish Republic Party. The war was brutal, taking an approximate 500,000 victims⁵ and shaking the foundations of Spanish society. Franco and his fascist Nationalist party won and brought in a Nationalist regime which lasted for nearly forty years until his Franco’s death in 1975. Under the regime, people who criticised society and politics were often imprisoned. Religions other than Catholicism were not tolerated and elements that were considered ‘un-Spanish’ were repressed. As a consequence, sports like bullfighting and dances like the Flamenco were heavily promoted. Regional languages and dialects were no longer officially recognised in an attempt to try and build a single Spanish national identity. Whereas by the 50’s and 60’s, women in the rest of Western Europe were gaining greater independence, particularly within the realm of education and employment, Franco’s regime encouraged traditional family units where women took on more domestic roles. Homosexuality was illegal and legalised after Franco’s death in 1979. Films and all other cultural output in Spain had to pass strict censorship rules and any content that seemed to criticise the regime or have anti Catholic, communist, liberal or gender progressive messages were subject to censorship. Jordan and Allinson describe some of the censorship problems facing film-makers during the Franco Era:

Film censorship was rolled out nation-wide after July 1939. Within its remit were tasks such as the pre-censorship of all submitted film scripts, the approval of shooting scripts and exhibition licences for Spanish films, the imposition of cuts and changes to sound and image tracks in completed films, the authorisation of subtitling or dubbing plus film classification.⁶

Despite this, the Franco regime did recognise the potential of film in reflecting Spanish national identity and during the 1960s government sponsored film schools were set up such as The Official Film School. As Faulkner notes, the Franco regime was keen for film to be a medium of quality and as such, many Spanish films were made with the intention that they be entered into foreign film festivals such as Cannes.⁷ The whole system was filled with bureaucracy and as a consequence, born in 1949, the films that Almodóvar would have watched in his youth would either have been those that gave a biased, uncritical, traditional vision of Spain or, they would have been foreign, mainly American films that did not challenge the ideology of the Franco regime.

La Movida Madrileña

Franco’s death in 1975 not only caused immense political upheaval, in the formation of a new democratic system of government, but also lead to a cultural movement La Movida Madrileña. Almodóvar was at the heart of the movement which was typified by: experimentation in gender identity, youth culture, colour, cultural innovation and the popularity of 60’s and 70’s pop art and punk styles in fashion and interior decor. Paula Willoquet-Maricondi described La Movida as ‘a rising ‘new Spanish mentality’ bent on overcoming boundaries and taboos’.⁸ The period was a reaction against all that had repressed under Franco. It was an era of hedonism, creative expression, tolerance of new kinds of subcultures and sexual orientations. Almodóvar describes this era:

It’s difficult to speak of La Movida and explain it to those who didn’t live those years. We weren’t a generation; we weren’t an artistic movement; we weren’t a group with a concrete ideology. We were simply a bunch of people that coincided in one of the most explosive moments in the country.⁹

Almodóvar was a central part of the La Movida Madrileña movement both in its instigation and in chronicling its development. He wrote comic books and sung in a glam rock parody band alongside Fabio McNamara. He directed and acted in his own short films made on Super 8 cameras which were shown at parties and bars in Barcelona and, the city at the heart of La Movida, Madrid. He wrote articles about the movement for the newspaper El Pais and countercultural magazines such as Vibraciones thus arguably giving the movement more social and cultural recognition and significance. He directed his first feature length film five years after Franco’s death. Pepi, Luci, Bom and other Girls on the Heap (1980) is a riotous collage of hedonism, sexual exploration and the punk aesthetic which reflects the party culture and sexual openness of the new Madrid. Similarly, his 1987 film Law of Desire explores the impact of La Movida by exploring the growing openness to different sexual experiences (notably orgies) and the growing tolerance towards homosexuality by featuring gay relationships.

La Movida and the general shift in politics and culture had a huge impact on the gender roles in Spanish society. Almodóvar grew up in a very female centred and lead community which was in contrast to the patriarchal nature of Franco lead society across Spain. Although his father was a constant figure in his life, it is, for the majority of his films, his mother and his sisters whom he seems to be more inspired by. As Suzie Mackenzie states Almodóvar’s ‘entire career has been devoted to subverting images of power’.¹⁰ The image of power for much of Almodóvar’s childhood would have been male in the form of the Franco regime, the Civil Guard (Franco’s military police force) and the Catholic