Pedro Almodóvar’s latest opus begins with a modern dance. Two grand dames in gauzy nightgowns stagger around a stage littered with chairs. They wander with their eyes are squeezed shut, stumbling as if in a trance. A man scrambles to knock the furniture out of their way. Sometimes he arrives too late and the women slam against the wall.
 

The performance is Pina Bausch’s Café Muller (staring the silver-haired dancer herself). The piece serves as a metaphor for the film’s major themes. In caring for unobtainable women, the main characters create their own obstacles. Borrowing a bit of Jungian psychology, the yin-yangy story touches the age-old themes of Anima (a man's feminine side), and Animus (a woman's masculine side).
 

During the recital, two strangers sit together. Neither realizes how their lives will intertwine. Marco (Darío Grandinetti) is macho and intense. He writes travelogues that read like voyeuristic novels. Benigno (Javier Cámara), the effeminate male nurse, is a thirty-year-old virgin. When Marco cries in the quiet darkness of the theater, Benigno recognizes something in him—a familiar sense of empathy.
 

When Marco spies a female matador on a trashy TV show, he vows to snag an interview. Like Marco, the daring Lydia (Rosario Flores) is mending a broken heart. One night, Marco drives her home and learns her secret weakness. Despite her bravery around bulls, Lydia is paralyzed by snakes. She refuses to go back inside the house. The snake is a bad omen. Soon she is gored in a bullfight and drifts into a coma.
 

In the hospital, Marco meets Benigno, a nurse obsessed with his comatose patient, Alicia (Leonor Watling), a victim of a car accident. From his apartment, Benigno used to watch the girl during her dance lessons. For hours he would stand by the window, studying her elegant limbs. Now she is completely in his care. Although Benigno seems earnest in his devotion, there’s a hint of creepy selfishness behind his motivations. Until she became his patient, Benigno knew little about Alicia. In a peculiar twist of fate, he has made it his business to know everything about her body. But their “conversations” are merely monologues. She cannot talk to him.
 

Almodóvar often films Alicia in the nude. This may seem like the director is exploiting her—until we realize that we, as spectators, are sharing Benigno’s point of view. The film contrasts the female leads: one aggressive, the other passive. Lydia, with her wedge-shaped head and streamlined muscles, seems masculine, what one might call “handsome.” Alicia sleeps like a fairy-tale princess, her long hair curling around her dark, coin-shaped nipples. Each woman appears in a sensual dressing scene. While Lydia straps herself into the glittering costume of a matador, attendants lace the strings on Alicia’s hospital gown.

Talk to Her includes an excerpt from a silent film of Almodóvar’s kinky imagination. In a segment called “Shrinking Lover,” a man is so dedicated to pleasing his love, he literally loses himself in her. Another highlight is Caetano Veloso’s plaintive rendition of “Cucurrucucú paloma,” a song whose poignancy needs no translation. In less capable hands, the film’s audacious material might have bordered on melodrama. Almodóvar has put aside his Telenova tendencies to create some of the most ambivalent and complex characters to reach the silver screen. How can we judge them with conventional morality? Can we equate their fixation on these helpless women with love? Or does it come from a darker place? In a state that hovers near death, why do the women seem more alive? Almodóvar gives no easy answers. The questions are what matter most.