CineCity Top 10 Film Poll – 2002 – Talk To Her

Today we are starting our build up to the big event in our calendar, CineCity. Scott takes a look at his top films from the past ten years, Starting with Talk To Her 2002

With the festival looming, CINECITY has announced it build up campaign, and what kind of movie fan Brightonian would I be if I didn’t get involved. But what is it all about? Read on…

CineCity 2012, Brighton Film Festival is approaching, and from 15th November to 2nd December the City will be taken over by films fans attending events in 10 venues including the ever brilliant Duke of York’s Picturehouse. This yearn is a special one as it is the 10th edition. To help with the build up, the boffins behind the festival have asked us fans to come up with our TOP 10 FILMS OF THE LAST 10 YEARS. I have decided to run a series of 10 posts with a feature on my favorite film from the chosen year.

But what would you choose? Why not get involved yourself. All you have to do is tweet, facebook message, or blog your top 10 films of the last 10 years and include the hashtag

#CINECITY10th

The top films will be compiled and the results will be announced during the festival, but do not panic I will report back here to announce the winners to those of your overseas.

But remember to see your fave, get involved!!

So we start. 2002 was a funny year, if you look at the top films of Rotten Tomatoes there are some fantastic picks from Spiderman to Adaptation, from Lord of the Rings:The Two Towers to City of God (which I am sure will win the poll)… The choice is quite diverse. For me though to start my list I have to include my favourite Pedro Almodovar film of all time TALK TO HER. Here is my review of the film.

TALK TO HER (2002)

As the film opens we are greeted by two men sitting in the audience of an avant-garde ballet performance where two sleep walking ballerinas are dancing around the stage being stopped from falling over and bumping into chairs by a male dancer. This strange dance has a deep effect on Benigno, played by Javier Camara, he is so moved that the tears simply flood from his eyes, he turns and notices that the man next to him is also crying. Marco, played by Dario Grandinetti, now has a special bond with Benigno through their tears.

Talk To Her is Pedro Almodovar’s 14th feature and the follow-up to his oscar winning All About My Mother from 2000. The story follows Benigno, a hospital nurse who spends his working day looking after a comatose ballet dancer named Alicia.

Through a number of flashbacks we learn that he is actually in love with Alicia and has been since the first time he saw her dancing in the Ballet studio across the street from where he lives before her accident. Now he lavishes her with all of his attention and care, convinced that she can hear the words he speaks and the love he is sending her.

Much to Benigno’s surprise he notices Marco at his hospital visiting Lydia, a matador who fell into a coma after she was gored by a bull. Even though Lydia is in a vegetable state Benigno advises Marco to ‘Talk To Her’. In another series of flashbacks we learn that Marco is a travel writer that became infatuated by the female Matador and blames himself and their blossoming relationship for her lack of concentration in the ring that caused the near fatal accident.

Almodovar is famous for making films about women, but never as sex objects. There is no other director alive that can show the amount of love for the female form but never dips into making them the objects of male desire. Lydia’s twitching matador is probably the closest you will get to Almodovar’s style of women, but it is the handling of Alicia’s ballet teacher played brilliantly by Geraldine Chaplin where the director exceeds expectation. She could have been so easily the brunt of cheap jokes, but the Almodovar presents her as a woman whose soft interior and soul must be deflected by her hard reflective shell.

The pleasant surprise with Talk To Her is Almodovar’s handling of the male characters. Marco is initially the hell-hound haunted by his own guilt and denies his passions, but through the film he learns to embrace the feminine response and therefore gains strength as a man. A lot of this roles success has to come down to the stellar performance by Grandinetti, whose turn is understated yet perfectly framed by the Spanish auteur.

Camara on the other hand has a much more obvious role, but no less successful. His clammy, camp and beady eyed turn is almost like an odd version of Norman Bates, but with less homicidal tendencies. But in Almodovar’s expert hands and vision, we soon polarize our view of him, from creepy carer to the carrier of loves greatest flame.

Almodovar films have always been full of shock and perversity, but with Talk to Her the director seems to grow up a little. He seems less in need of shocking us for shocking sake (although The Skin I Live In did a very good job at shocking us). His tell-tale signs are still present, vivid colours, over the top cat fights, even penis jokes, but it all feels a lot more ‘set in the real world’ than his previous films. The beauty of Talk To Her is that it ignites a flame inside you that you didn’t even know was there, you want to find out more about this world that only exists with this film maker shouts action and shoots.

There we have it, our first instalment of the TOP 10 FILMS of the last 10 years – What would you choose for 2002? Well to get involved you can blog your own post and tweet it with the hashtag #cinecity10th or you could tweet it to @cinecity_bton or add it to their facebook page HERE, or if you are shy… why not add it in the comment section below and I will tweet it for you!!!

CINECITY BRIGHTON FILM FESTIVAL WILL RUN FROM 15TH NOVEMBER TO 2ND DECEMBER 2012 FOR MORE INFO VISIT THE HOMEPAGE HERE