The viewers conflict in judging the moral injury caused by Benigno who is originally presented as caring. We see Benigno caring and talking to Alicia, but we are not shown the traumatic events.
Notes and Quotes:
‘Benigno’s action is as close to necrophilia as is possible, given that the raped woman is technically still alive. And yet the movie, for the most part, treats Benigno, as a largely sympathetic character; indeed, he is probably the most sympathetic figure in the film. More specifically, he is presented in the movie as the chief exemplar of a kind of fundamental human virtue’.
‘much of the verbal “talking” in Talk to Her is represented as acutely problematic, a source of distortion, misunderstanding, and outright manipulation. Benigno seems to be an exception here’
First, we are not directly shown the rape or any part of it. Instead, the rape is implicitly indicated on screen by an odd collision of abstract shapes; by the collision of the red globules that drift around in a lava lamp sitting next to Alicia’s hospital bed.
Talk to Her shows a variety of ways in which a person can come to be, or take him or herself to be, in significant touch with another creature even though no speaking has or could have taken place between them. Speech is presented as just one strand in a
complex network of conventional and natural patterns of communication, and it is a mode of conventional communication whose unreliable nature is emphasized and elaborated.
Marco reassures her on that score, informs her that Benigno has died, and then, as she takes in the changed situation, says: “You and I should talk, and it will be simpler than you think.” But Katerina seems somewhat skeptical about what the proposed talk might achieve. Her reply to him—the last words of the film—has considerable resonance. She states: “Nothing is simple. I’m a ballet mistress, and nothing is simple.” And what she implicitly tells him with these words is certainly true: whatever hope that there may be for a restorative relationship between Marco and Alicia, there is no way that the realization of such a possibility will be simple
In the penultimate scene of the movie, Marco stands at Benigno’s graveside, and he talks to him. He talks feelingly and unreservedly to his dead friend—a person who is now even more surely beyond the reach of his words than Alicia and Lydia (in the hospital) ever were.
As the camera pans back and forth across the divisions of the cubicle, the reflection of first one man and then the other is superimposed upon the figure of the other. It is as if Marco can now see Benigno embodied in his own physical being and Benigno can see Marco in the same way, and it is the striking effect of the panning across the reflecting glass division that it makes it possible for the audience to see at least roughly what they are seeing in the other
Marco can tell Benigno without constraint that it is fine with him if others think that he is Benigno’s “boyfriend.” After the emblematic moment of the merging of the two friends, Marco actually begins to adopt various aspects of Benigno’s life before prison. He moves into Benigno’s apartment, which Benigno had partially redesigned from catalogues to realize his rather dull, conventional ideal of a desirable domestic environment. Like
Benigno before him, Marco begins to gaze out of the apartment window that looks out on Katerina’s ballet studio across the street. And, to his surprise and ours, Marco sights Alicia (now miraculously recovered), who has come back to the studio to visit her former teacher. Moreover, it is clear that he is not only struck by seeing her again, but recognizes some growing feeling for her—a fascination and attachment that intensifies before they ever meet one another face-to- face.
Almodóvar asserts that Marco is the spokesman for the audience here and at other places in the film
In one shot, he is meticulously massaging her lower torso, and just after he finishes his account of Shrinking Lover and tries to explain his reactions to the film, the massage is now directed at one of Alicia’s inner thighs. This second shot of the massage especially offers us a more chilling view of Benigno as he looks slightly dazed, disturbed, and sexually aroused. And then, the movie abruptly cuts away from him to the oozing red forms that drift within the bedside lava lamp. This is an especially important moment in which his darker, more threatening side has been pretty overtly manifested in his countenance and behaviour.
It is my impression that, for Almodóvar, Benigno is a kind of genuine saint; but in Almodóvar’s world, sainthood is fully compatible with bizarre fetishization and even crime. We may struggle to keep our conflicted responses to Benigno straight, but
Talk to Her does not require that we conflate the moral and non-moral considerations
upon which those responses have been based.
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