Talk to Her

Pedro Almodóvar's Talk to Her won the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay in 2002 (an unusual achievement for a Spanish-language film) alongside the BAFTA, Golden Globe and European Film Award for Best Film Not in English Language. The film arrived three years after All About My Mother and is widely regarded as the apex of Almodóvar's mature mode, alongside that earlier film and Volver.

Two men, both attending to women in comas in a Madrid clinic, form an unexpected friendship. Marco (Darío Grandinetti) is a journalist whose girlfriend Lydia, a bullfighter (Rosario Flores), has been gored. Benigno (Javier Cámara, in a performance of disquieting tenderness) is a male nurse caring for the dancer Alicia (Leonor Watling), whom he had been quietly obsessed with before her accident. The film's structural masterstroke (the silent-film insertion of Shrinking Lover, in which a tiny man enters the body of his sleeping beloved) is one of the most controversial scenes Almodóvar ever directed, and is the lever by which the film addresses, without naming, an act of profound moral wrong.

Talk to Her divided audiences on whether it asks us to sympathise with Benigno or to indict him; the film holds the question open with characteristic Almodóvar generosity. Caetano Veloso's onscreen performance of Cucurrucucú Paloma is one of the most beautiful musical sequences in any of his films.

Why it's an Editor's Pick: Almodóvar's most formally daring film, and the rare work that takes a profoundly difficult subject and refuses to resolve it for the audience's comfort. The screenplay Oscar was the right one.