Almost Perfect

In Talk to Her, Javier Cémara's attentive nurse seems like the perfect guy -- with just one huge catch.

by Sam Adams

You can see why Pedro Almodõvar picked Javier Cémara for the lead in his typically provocative Talk To Her. Stopping by the Four Seasons for a chat, the actor seems irrepressibly jovial, communicating so vigorously that even his four-month-old grasp of the English language is no barrier. He's a huge TV star in his native Spain as well, which only adds to his trustworthiness. All that combines to make Cémara's sweet-voiced Benigno, a nurse caring for the comatose Alicia (Leonor Watling) seem like the epitome of gentleness. Cémara says he's had women come up to him and gush about how Benigno's 'the perfect man¨ -- which is a little odd, considering how the movie turns out. (Spoiler-averse readers should flip to the adult ads now.) Benigno, it turns out, has been obsessed with Alicia since long before she entered the hospital, and eventually ends up violating her, never losing his cheery affect until he's caught and thrown in jail. Never one to present viewers with easy options, Almodõvar maintains sympathy for Benigno even after we find out what he's done -- which would be impossible were he not incarnated in such harmless-seeming form.

Cémara recalls hashing out a scene where Benigno, having set up an appointment with Alicia's therapist father, sneaks around the corner from his office and spies on her as she showers. Cémara initially played the scene with a nervous Benigno surveying the hallway before turning the corner, but Almodõvar gave him a critical note: 'Don't think. Benigno doesn't have process. He doesn't think. You look, and you enter. You don't think if it's better or worse: You go.¨Such direction flies right in the face of most movie acting (it's almost impossible to imagine an American actor meeting the challenge); Cémara says he struggled most with the movie's first half, where he could only play Benigno's public face, or at least the inside of the fantasy world where he and Alicia truly are in love. But he was helped to a deeper understanding of the script by his developing sense of the man who wrote it. 'I think he's talking about a big change in his life,¨ Cémara ventures. 'In his first films, the people are so Spanish, in the street, talking, being crazy. But now, communication is more difficult. He has a lot of microphones in his life, but he has lost contact with people. The people who go to talk to Almodõvar now are so excited -- they're not normal.¨ Thus Benigno's inability to connect with regular people, his need to formulate relationships inside his own head. But Cémara found the beauty in Benigno's pathology by finding it in Almodõvar's imposed isolation. 'He begins to find something more deeply in himself, and this is more universal. He enters into the heart of himself. He talks about something very deep, and very autobiographical -- about communication, the most extreme and radical form of love.¨

(sam@citypaper.net)