Up to a point Benigno the virgin seems to have the ideal relationship. His chatting while tending to Alicia, who remains totally silent and passive, is so much less messy than even the brief relationship between Marco and Lydia, with all its stormily confused sexual symbols--snakes, bulls and bullfighting, tears. One night Benigno tells Alicia all about a silent movie he went to called The Shrinking Lover (a stylistically sensational fake on Almodóvar's part). In this movie a female scientist develops a potion for weight control; before she can test it, however, her portly male lover drinks it down to prove that he takes her seriously. Unfortunately it makes him shrink until he can fit in her purse, and other places. At the end of the excerpts we see, after the scientist has rescued him from his domineering mother and taken him into her bed, the tiny lover climbs up on her breasts and then down to her vagina where he experimentally sticks his arm in before heading on in for good. For Benigno and Alicia it seems the mess can be contained in a work of art.

Up to this point the movie appears to be a work of comic irony about heterosexual relationships. Benigno, whose name implies good intentions, comes off as an ideal lover if you don't like drama. In a crazy way, he and Alicia are lucky. But Benigno has his issues as well, it turns out, and isn't quite as harmless as we thought. The movie quickly brings us out of the suspended fantasy world in which we were amused by the conceit of Benigno's devotion to Alicia with a page stolen from the great romantic ironist Heinrich von Kleist's 1810 novella The Marquise of O. Harmless Benigno harms Alicia, though to her ultimate benefit. Almodóvar doesn't switch gears in an abrupt manner or with didactic intent; he just subtly reminds us that movies are movies and what we're seeing isn't (though of course it is). There's no way around the mess in human relationships; our drives don't permit it.

Talk to Her is a superbly crafted movie, both more particular and more elliptical in its storytelling than almost all American dramas. It makes something like The Hours, or worse, Far from Heaven, look very clodhopping indeed. The way those movies exemplify their themes, they're like used textbooks covered with highlighter. Almodóvar's integration of dance and music (including a haunting live performance by the Brazilian musician Caetano Veloso of the song Cucurrucucú paloma) and design and movies has become extremely fluent since he burst on the international scene with his bad-boy lunacies in the '80s. But I have to say, it's the naughty poofter who made What Have I Done to Deserve This?, Matador (with Antonio Banderas as the pathetic, immature rapist), Law of Desire, and Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown that many of us fell in love with. Those explosive comedies were so distinctive because they seemed to place no limit on Almodóvar's access to his subconscious and yet they weren't interior, hushed, private. He gave parties in his head and everybody came. But his style was so marked that he had a legitimate fear of imitating himself and so struck out in other directions. A decade before Todd Haynes tried to put some dramatic fiber into a Douglas Sirk movie in Far from Heaven, Almodóvar tried it. He hasn't become earnest, going for settled prestigious "big" subjects in the manner of American entertainers like Steven Spielberg and Jonathan Demme (and George Stevens before them) who decide it's time to win some awards. But he does lay out his themes in a slightly too-skillful manner.