Whose Talk Is It? Almodovar and the Fairy Tale in Talk to Her

Abstract

So, face face with the Sleeping Beauty-who has long been the dream of every man and the hope of every woman-we find ourselves compelled ask: what is it in us that at a certain moment suddenly falls asleep? Who lies hidden deep between us? And who will come at last wake us, what aspect of ourselves? P. L. Travers, About the Sleeping Beauty But when ultimately you find yourself welling with tears of sympathy for an alleged rapist, you realise what a master filmmaker Almodovar is. Amazon.ukReview Given the traumatic nature of some of its scenes, it is surprising that arguably the most successful film date by Spanish director Pedro Almodovar, far from provoking indignation, has met with almost universal critical and popular acclaim, including an Academy Award in the United States for best screenplay. The notion that a director might evoke audience sympathy for a rapist, even among female viewers, seems rather implausible. To fully appreciate this achievement, we must understand how Almodovar's use of narrative devices from fairy tales makes the story work. Were it not for the fact that the story is built on a fairy tale, with its corresponding dividing line between the real world and the world of fantasy, it would be impossible swallow without feeling repulsed by its underlying significance. Not surprisingly, the movie encountered strong criticism for its uses of female bodies and traditional symbolism, particularly in Spain.1 Writer and film critic Pilar Aguilar rejected Almodovar's depiction of women, asserting that this movie was an expression of how little the director liked women and a repetition of his use of them for purely selfish and manipulative reasons. More importantly, she refused consider him, or this movie, subversive in any way, unlike, say, Cuban writer Guillermo Cabrera Infante (Homenaje). But not all women felt the same way Colombian journalist Gabriela Castellanos Llanos forgave Almodovar his happy ending and his treatment of women, instead choosing privilege the social criticism implied in the movie and its formal perfection. I mention this particular exchange because it helps us understand how this movie is in terms of gender, how we need be careful in teasing out its different meanings, and why some critics felt compelled overlook things they would otherwise reject. In the present essay I will show how Talk Her both exploits and reinvents traditional fairy-tale narratives with a view toward testing the bounds of the distinctions between the emotional and the rational, between moral and amoral. I will attempt demonstrate how the film employs fairy-tale strategies in critiquing a contemporary society beset by dehumanization and alienation. But as we shall see, in making his case the director imposes a misogynist conception of gender that must be analyzed with extreme care. In the very act of subverting relationships between men by reinventing the fairy tale, he re-creates utterly traditional female characters. This tension between reinvention and recapitulation is not unique Almodovar. As A. S. Byatt has pointed out, these stories are riddles, and they accept and resist change simultaneously (Ice 83). In what follows I will show how Almodovar reinvents this genre and what it reveals about his critique of contemporary male life, framed between the failure of both capitalism and socialism provide channels of communication between society and the individual. I argue that the Spanish director plays with fairy tales just as Byatt does in the creation of her own tales. She calls her fairy stories postmodern, in that they reflect on the nature of narrative, and of their own narrative in particular. Narration is seen as the goal as well as the medium-the heroines tend be narrators, and the same could be said of Almodovar's movie (Fairy Stories). We might describe Talk Her as a complex fairy that, as Elizabeth Harries writes, works to reveal the stories behind other stories, the unvoiced possibilities that tell a different tale (17). …