stage, Talk to Her begins with the same curtain, also opening. But now instead of actresses, this film concerns men who narrate their lives, who talk or attempt to
communicate to those who can hear them and above all, those who cannot. The curtain rises on a piece of filmed theater: A dance performance linking the cinematic and
choreographic spectacles. The performance begins with a ballerina dancing in close up and another ballerina standing in the background, as a delayed shadow of the first woman; and both somnambulist women hesitate, stumble blindly across the stage, hitting the walls, and delicately falling down to the floor. One male dancer desperately tries to stay one step ahead of the ballerinas in close up, moving obstacles out of their
path. In the audience a pair of men are sitting side-by-side: Marco and Benigno.
Marco deeply absorbed in the dance and moved to tears, and Benigno who ignores the performance and looks intently and fascinatedly at Marco’s emotional intensity.
The two men meet again at the private clinic where Benigno works and establish a friendship. Benigno continually chats to Alicia; slowly and gently he tries to communicate with the object of his longtime voyeuristic obsession, hoping she will come out of coma. Alicia is Benigno’s doll. He bathes her, dresses her, and makes her look pretty. In short, he pretends to be in a relationship without having to deal with the other person’s desires.
Benigno is the heart of the film, literally and spiritually. His obsession for Alicia becomes both a love story and a horror story. Sexually dubious and dormant, he has learned caregiving by tending for his invalid mother. He has transferred his skills and affections but he barely knows Alicia. Benigno has fallen in love with her from a distance and exchanged only a few words with her when she was awake. One night while chatting to Alicia Benigno narrates the story of an erotic silent film, in which a tiny, shrunken man is seen exploring and penetrating the nude female body of the lover who shrank from him. While telling the story, Benigno commits a societal transgression; he has sex with the vulnerable Alicia, and impregnates her. Whilst traveling abroad Marco reads that Lydia has died. He phones the clinic and finds out that Benigno is in trouble, and then goes back to Madrid to help him, but his efforts are in vain. Benigno goes to prison, is denied information about the fate of Alicia and their newborn, and in his attempt to go into a coma and join Alicia he dies. For Alicia, the sexual abuse has left her with a gain: the chance of a new beginning. Her dreadful experience has taken her out of the coma. Marco, who inherits Benigno’s apartment and his love for Alicia, sees from the same window that Benigno used to gaze at Alicia, that she is alive and recovering
Lydia
from the coma. One day they meet at a theater and feel an immediate connection between them. Another relationship is established.
Bad Education.
Since Bad Education is a film-within a film, and its intricate screenplay interweaves layers of flashbacks, flashbacks-within-flashbacks, and tricky narratives creating a wicked mystery, the dates are very important, serving as key to understanding the story. The film goes back and forth between 1964 and 1980, with a climax set mostly in 1977. The film starts in 1980, with a visit by an actor who announces himself as Ignacio (García Bernal), to a successful young filmmaker called Enrique Goded (Fele Martínez), who is in search of a story to tell. Ignacio introduces himself as his old intimate friend from back at Catholic boarding school, but Enrique does not recognize features, since he has not seen Ignacio for 16 years. Moreover, Ignacio tells him that he has changed his name to Angel, and insists on using only this artistic name. Ignacio/Angel explains that he is now a professional actor seeking work; and drops off a manuscript of a story he has written, The Visit, which he hopes Enrique will adapt into a film.
Enrique agrees to read the script and learns that it alludes to his and Ignacio’s youth in the mid sixties, when they fell in love at a Catholic school. At that time, Father Manolo (Daniel Giménez-Cacho), a literature teacher and principal of the school, obsessed with Ignacio, then an attractive boy soprano, expelled Enrique (Raúl García Forneiro) from the school after catching sight of them hiding in a school washroom.
Ignacio’s story, The Visit, creates a fictional gathering in the 70’s of the characters of the 60’s and 80’s, including a suburban family man (Enrique) and a drug-addicted transvestite named Zahara (Ignacio). Zahara poses
Benigno
as Ignacio’s sister and blackmails the priest who abused Ignacio for the price of a sex change, using a story written by Ignacio also called The Visit. The threat is to expose father Manolo as a pedophile.
Enrique gets involved with the semi-autobiographical aspects of Ignacio/Angel’s stories, memories and imagination, and decides to write a screenplay and shoot the film.
However, Ignacio/Angel insists on playing the main character in The Visit, the female impersonator Zahara (Gael Garcia Bernal). Enrique callously sets out to seduce Ignacio/
Angel, aiming to push his limits and unveil some of his secrets. But Ignacio/Angel who desperately wishes to play the leading role, does not care what he needs to do to succeed as an actor, even pretending to be gay. Enrique investigates Ignacio/Angel’s past and uncovers mortal sins. Ultimately, Enrique disentangles this network of pretense, impersonations, reiterations and performances when Father Manolo (Lluís Homar)—
who has left the church, gotten married and had a kid, and lives under the name of Berenguer—voluntarily tells Enrique what happened.
Enrique finds out that, as in The Visit, Ignacio is a drug-addicted transgender, who has been determined to blackmail Father Manolo to obtain as much as necessary to complete his sexual transformation. This is the real Ignacio, Enrique’s first love, not Ignacio/Angel. Ignacio/Angel turns out to be Ignacio’s younger brother, Juan (Ignacio/
Angel/Juan), who has stolen Ignacio’s screenplay and impersonates him. Berenguer tells Enrique that while being blackmailed by Ignacio, he fell in love with Juan and both decided to get rid of Ignacio and keep the ransom for themselves. They gave Ignacio an overdose of heroine and he died while writing a letter to Enrique saying that he had finished The Visit. Then Juan hustles, abandons, and starts blackmailing Berenguer, using The Visit, letters and their private erotic videos. After confessing to Enrique, Berenguer meets Juan who threatens him with death; and some time later, a car driven by Juan runs down Berenguer and he dies. Juan marries, becomes a famous fashion model, and does television work. Enrique carries on making films.
Overdye, Overhaul, and Overfill: Analyzing All That Bad
Almodóvar’s films have a look and feel that is very particular; each reminds you of another film by Almodóvar. Citationality in Almodóvar narratives leads to an endless arrangement of reiteration of gender, functioning as a lexicon in which every entry leads the spectator to another entry reaching search of the “initial” meanings;
but the original is always altered. Thus what I initially observe is that Almodóvar’s movies, from Pepi Lucy, Bom and Other Girls on the Heap to Bad Education, through this recurrent masquerade of gender and sexuality, cite and alter the previously performed
representations in his earlier movies, which are themselves imitations of previous referents. Therefore I am suggesting that there is no original theme upon and around these
citations, because the performances of citations themselves manufacture this foundation. As Butler puts it “gender is a kind of imitation for which there is no original; in fact it is a kind of imitation that produces the very notion of the original as an effect and consequence of the imitation itself” (Butler, 1993b, p. 313). In this sense, I maintain that Almodóvar’s film representations of gender become coherent to the spectator through the understanding of these foldings, doublings, inventions, and their repetition in the alterations; in short they become clear as a repetition in their recurrent citations. masculinity has been mostly linked to power, reason, ingenuousness, naturalness, integrity, agency, virility, bravery, physicality, and
promptness, while femininity has been associated with mimicry, masquerade, affectation, obedience, dependency, limitation, naturalness, nurturing, and attractiveness. These positions have been respectively fixed on men