Talk to Her; 8 Women
Almodovar's movies were once reliably hot stuff, now he's just gimmicky. Talk to Her's female idolatry happens when both women are comatose?a narrative ploy that requires the implementation of elaborate flashbacks and cleverly staged monologues, the usual Almodovarian flair. Benigno and Marco seem to be worshiping at a shrine?it's the idea of Woman as Love's avatar. But this displaces the audience's urge to see the unspoken tension between these men satisfied. Actually, the tension's in us?socially bred. But where early Almodovar imports Law of Desire (1987) and Matador (1986) took flight by justifying homosexual desire as among love's unpredictable, dangerous varieties, Talk to Her takes weird pains to redefine normal love, and in the end it's decidedly unsatisfying. Without his initial, automatic, post-Franco effrontery, Talk to Her shows the downside of Almodovar finally achieving bourgeois acceptance. His 1999 film, the overwrought All About My Mother, suggested that he had become a mail-order John Waters, making "outrageous" movies deliberately designed for comfortable consumption. Its placidity was reassuring to those viewers made uneasy by Almodovar's usual gay flamboyance (the thing that heated up his last good movie, Live Flesh). With a hetero-identified woman at its center, All About My Mother took back the homosexual advance that had ignited Patrice Chereau's Those Who Love Me Can Take the Train that same year.
Those artists' sexual bravura was unique. Almodovar and Chereau had distilled desire and romance to an essence that crossed gender; longing and confusion seemed to leap off the screen, one constantly turning into the other. That's still a theme in Talk to Her, but the veering into madness feels progressively contrived, providing dubious big-screen affirmation to once-suppressed feelings. It's no surprise that some viewers complain Talk to Her is misogynistic. Given a rape scene comically depicted as a b&w silent-movie fantasy (stolen from one of Bertrand Blier's horny conceits), the romanticization of incapacitated women might understandably seem hostile. I instinctively defend Almodovar of such a charge; his love of color, personality?and the female spirit?is always to be preferred in a world infected by Neil LaBute's arid misanthropy. But it cannot be ignored that something's gone awry in Almodovar's openhearted universe.
Arguing against all sexual preconceptions, Almodovar concocts perverse behavior (meaning that in a good way). It's exactly how you want a filmmaker (heterosexual or homosexual) to respect human relations?arguing on behalf of amatory pioneers. Who can deny that the intensity of Senso, Little Women, The Reckless Moment, Gigi, Lola and The House of Mirth derives from the humane miracle of men expressing themselves through the emotions of female characters? This not only revolutionized the movie melodrama, it also pushed social consciousness forward. And with an imaginative leap, Morrissey accomplished a similar feat in the Smiths' 1987 single "Girlfriend in a Coma," discreetly expressing AIDS-era anxiety through a socially accepted romantic commonplace. Almodovar, who is very pop-savvy, may have attempted to repeat Morrissey's coup in Talk to Her. But how much more helpful it would be if an artist of his caliber simply concentrated on men's reluctance to communicate?and thus vivified their shy-but-defensive longing to do so. That's what made Live Flesh special. Talk to Her, for all its strange inventions, is mundane.
Another precedent for Ozon's pageant is Almodovar's 1988 Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown (also Genet's The Maids, as well as Ozon's Sitcom?all murderous farces). Ozon's deliberate artifice is not mindless, as some critics suggested; it prompts reflection on how women perform in familiar social and theatrical situations that objectify them. Critic Gregory Solman added that this includes patriarchy's mindset?it all may be happening within the turned-on/turned-off consciousness of the one man (father/lover/ brother/employer) who obsesses about all eight women. They put on a casually brilliant show. Who knew Huppert was an expert comedienne? She plays a rip-snorting old maid in a beehive hairdo whose repression lets loose in a strong, catty voice. Ardant, in a silver-black suit with red piping, sings and dances, recalling Cyd Charisse. Deneuve, costumed in green velvet with satin trim and a gold brooch, resembles a high-breasted rose. Beart, gloriously sexy, strips before Deneuve to show how she seduced the older woman's husband, and Deneuve's reaction (been-there-done-that) is a knockout. A Deneuve-Ardant wrestling match evokes the lesbian scenes in The Hunger, but that was merely 80s chic, lacking the anarchic effect of Ozon's play with sex and style, iconography and narrative form. Only the musical numbers go flat in 8 Women; they aren't precisely stylish enough. (The Ducastel-Martineau team pulled off a better neo-musical in the Jacques Demy-influenced Jeanne and the Perfect Guy.) Yet 8 Women's popularity proves that audiences relish Ozon's thesis. It's a work of gay male admiration but also male empathy (thus winning female viewers' awe). Ozon's political codes are as recognizable as his mythological Douglas Sirk opening?a snowy, wooded soundstage setting that perfectly gleans the melodrama of women's lives from our collective dreams.
Clipped
1) Pregnancy gaffe?Julianne Moore bulging in her Betty Crocker dresses throws off the 50s dream scheme.
2) Sad-sack Dennis Quaid trades on his overfamiliar real-life bathos as a dickless down-low husband.
3) Anachronistic angry black maid (Viola Davis) congratulates audience on spotting her.
4) Neutered black male Dennis Haysbert was more subversive when he first rehearsed this role opposite Michelle Pfeiffer in Jonathan Kaplan's '92 Love Field.
5) Good Ed Lachman can't match Russell Metty's glowing spectrum in 50s Sirk movies.
6) Another Elmer Bernstein pastiche score, but without the dynamics that made him distinctive.
7) Bias-attack on Haysbert's child just a cheap Hollywood scam.
8) 50s era misunderstood; its actual social progress ignored.
9) Condescending tone lets audiences think prejudice is a thing of the past.
10) It's longer than an hour.