Verdict: Really something to talk about.

By ELEANOR RINGEL GILLESPIE
Cox News Service

"Talk to Her" may be Pedro Almodovar's best film yet. Considering that his credits include such marvelous movies as "What Have I Done to Deserve This?," "Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown" and the Oscar-winning "All About My Mother," that's saying something.

Known for his candy-colored, free-for-all flicks that are, by turn, frivolous, shocking and hilarious, Almodóvar has reached deep into his heart for this one. "Talk to Her" is funny, sexy, devastating and incurably romantic. And it manages all these things via a story only he could concoct.

In a shiny Madrid hospital, a nurse named Benigno (Javier Camara) tenderly ministers to Alicia (Leonor Watling), a young ballet dancer who's been in a coma ever since she was in a car accident four years earlier. He massages her legs to keep up the muscle tone, washes her hair, rubs creams all over her body. He even attends to certain bodily functions you don't really want to read about in print. (There's a reason for this: It reminds us how a person in a coma continues to function biologically.) Benigno's devotion is so complete that it's startling and touching and maybe a little creepy.

We first meet him at a dance performance. He's sitting next to a handsome stranger who is so moved by what he's seeing that tears stream down his cheeks. The man turns out to be Marco (Dario Grandinetti), a worldly journalist who's having an affair with Lydia (Rosario Flores, with her Picasso face), the most famous female bullfighter in the world. When she's gored by a bull, she too goes into a coma and lands at the same private hospital as Benigno and Alicia. Recognizing the distraught Marco from the night at the theater, he seeks him out and tries to help. His first and most important piece of advice: Talk to her.

Through flashbacks, Almodóvar fills in the blanks in these relationships, some more surprising than others. The less you know, the better, because it's best to meet these characters with a very open mind.

Almodóvar juggles the movie's elements expertly. In one very odd yet oddly amusing scene, the two men wheel their women onto a balcony for a little sun. Perched in their chairs, with their sunglasses and expensive shawls, they could be two wealthy Upper East Siders getting a little tan at the Hamptons.

In another scene, famed guitarist Caetano Veloso plays at a party, his music suggesting the passion and sensitivity these men feel. And in one of the most memorable sequences I've seen recently, Benigno goes to a silent film so he can tell Alicia about it. (She loved silent films.) The movie, a seven-minute short created by Almodovar, is called "The Shrinking Lover," and it's as obscene as it is transcendent in its tribute to the nature of love.

Like George Cukor, Almodovar has been praised mostly for his ability to direct women. Yet in "Talk to Her," the focus is on the men and the strange bond they form due to their shared difficulties. Grandinetti's Marco is an interesting mix — coolly self-composed most of the time but capable of breaking down and weeping in the presence of indelible beauty. However, the movie belongs to Camara. With his sad puppy dog eyes and delicate mien, he is at once pathetic and heroic, repugnant and tragic. He's a Prince Charming who, deep down, doesn't want his Seeping Beauty to awaken. When asked by Marco if he's single, he says with utter conviction, "I'm single, but I'm not alone."

"Love is saddest when it goes away," one character notes. Perhaps that's why, for all its inventiveness and wry humor, "Talk to Her" remains an essentially melancholy movie. Love is all there is, the filmmaker insists. Love may be futile, bizarre, unhealthy, but it is still love. And in Almodóvar's universe, it's all that really matters.