TALK TO HER: Offensive yet Touching

At one level, I found Pedro Almodovar's 'Talk To Her' extremely offensive. Picture this. A woman is lying on a hospital bed and the camera lovingly, lyrically, moves over her body, focussing more than once on her swelling breasts. A male nurse tenderly caresses her thigh, applies cream on her abdomen (with breasts in view again), manicures her nails and talks to her ceaselessly. The woman's eyes are closed. She cannot talk back or respond to his obviously erotic handling of her body. She is in a coma, and has been thus for four years – through all of which, presumably, the said nurse has been deriving pleasure from her body. That he is in love with her, and states, "these four years have been the richest of my life", or for that matter, the fact that he is apparently a disturbed individual doesn't take away from the exploitative premise of the plot.

Similarly, more than halfway through the film, Almodovar uses the film-within-film device and narrates the story of a tragic-comic absurd silent film about a man who drinks a potion created by his scientist lover and starts shrinking by the day. Finally, he becomes small enough to fit into her purse (or anywhere else, for that matter!) and while she's sleeping, rolls off her breast, jumps over her abdomen and enters her to stay inside forever. The ultimate male fantasy one would think! But also a brilliant thematic device to anticipate what's to come next.

And that's Almodovar's greatest achievement – to create questionable characters and morally perplexing situations and yet manipulate the viewer into sympathising with them. Which is why, at another level, I loved 'Talk To Her'. Because although I found much of the film's thematic content questionable, I still ended up loving its quirky characters and their unconventional choices.

Moreover, the fluency of the narrative, the juxtaposition of various other artistic devices such theatre, music, ballet and bull fighting, cleverly woven into a story about the ambiguities of gender roles, love, morality and faith, is exquisite. As is the precision with which Almodovar uses composition and colour. The bright, often garish reds, oranges and greens splashed liberally throughout the film lend a delectable kitschy quality and provide the perfect backdrop for this mawkish melodrama about 'frozen' women and weeping men who take years to get over a broken love affair.

One learns very little about the two women – Alicia the ballerina and Lydia, the sharp-faced matador – through the course of the narrative, except from the manner in which they are perceived and described by the two men Benigno (the almost effeminate nurse) and Marco (the introspective travel-guide writer). Both men get drawn closer to each other as they sit by the bedside of their comatose lovers (an entirely one-sided affair, as it turns out, in every sense). And they talk and share each other's sorrow with a sensitivity generally associated with women.

Through this bizarre tale, Almodovar questions convention and stereotypes and leaves the audience to take its own moral position. His own, apparently lies in the undefined areas of human existence – places that most other filmmakers wouldn't dare to visit.

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One wonders whether it would be appropriate to speak of 'Woh Lamhe' in the same space as 'Talk To Her'. But since I watched both films on the same day, and there is a very thin thread that ties them together, I take the risk. Mohit Suri's 'Woh Lamhe' is a manipulative film of another kind, obviously leagues below Almodovar's masterpiece.

This is another chapter in the exploitation of Parveen Babi's life by the Mahesh Bhatt camp. It is utterly distasteful and worse, a badly made film. The narrative is nothing but a rehash of the Bhatt-Babi affair we've already seen in 'Arth' two decades ago. Only this time it is marred by an over-the-top screenplay and lousy performances, particularly from Kangana Ranaut who plays the schizophrenic star a wannabe director (Shiny Ahuja, serviceable) latches on to in order to further his career. Predictably, he falls in love with her and when he finds out about her illness, goes out of his way to try and protect her from her abusive former lover and calculating mother.

The film itself leaves the viewer untouched. But throughout the screening, I kept wondering how Bhatt could use Babi's life so blatantly (in her lifetime and even after her death). It raises ethical questions, which the likes of Bhatt may be able to counter with philosophical gibberish. He has made an entire career out of turning his personal life into a public spectacle (and then even advertising it as autobiographical material). But to transgress another person's life time and again under the garb of creative license is repulsive.

Deepa Gumaste