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Underground > Film, TV & Theatre >

Un Film De Almodovar (contains spoilers)

  
 
Shortfatdyke
18:50 / 27.08.02
I've just got in from seeing 'Talk to Her', the new film by Almodovar. I feel a little bit disturbed by it, and I wondered if anyone else had seen it. I won't go into too much detail, but basically it concerns two women in comas. As the film goes on, we find that the nurse who's been looking after one of them is obsessed by her, to the point of wandering around her home after visiting her father and taking something from her room. She becomes pregnant after being raped by the nurse - while still in the coma. It's not so much the way it's portrayed in the film that bothered me, but the reaction to some of it from some of the audience and also the Guardian's review. Three gay men in the cinema found it screamingly funny during a discussion that some nuns had been raped by missionaries. They shut up as soon as the woman continued that the missionaries were used to raping local girls, but had stopped because of the risk of AIDS. I should've spoken to the men after the film, but I had to dash to the toilet and they'd gone when I'd got out. The Guardian's review described the rape almost in romantic terms, or 'possibly not a rape at all' - I'm not sure how a woman in a persistant vegetative state could possibly give consent to sex, especially with a man she'd previously been freaked out by. These two things have rather spoilt the film for me, and if anyone else has seen it, I'd be interested in their thoughts.
 
 
Ariadne
21:07 / 27.08.02
Hmm. I saw in on Saturday. I agree with you that it was disturbing, and I too had some tossers in the audience with me. But I did like the fact that Almadovar left the viewer to make that judgement.

I have to say that I loved the film precisely because of that unjudgemental take on the whole thing. I'm not sure if this is what you're suggesting, but I really don't think that Almadovar was saying the rape was okay. The nurse's colleagues were clearly revolted, as was the other male character. And yet, well... I think the whole point was about loneliness and desire and confusion and misery and love ... it was beautiful. And upsetting too, yes.

Did you like it, despite your reservations? Or did that spoil it for you?
 
 
Shortfatdyke
06:12 / 28.08.02
I had a good think about this last night and had to remind myself that just because I would not have been able to portray a rape without it being central to the story, doesn't mean someone else should do it the same way (frustrated director, oh yes!), and it was quietly condemned anyway, so no, I didn't really have a problem with the portrayal in the film, but of course when you're watching something in public, the reaction of those around you does colour it, one way or another. Or it does for me. I do feel rather ashamed of myself for not having a go at those blokes, though.

I have huge issues against bullfighting, too and I couldn't help wondering if the injuries to the bulls were real or not. I certainly hope not, but it did make me entirely unsympathetic to the fighter that was gored. So, in all, I did like the film, but not in the same way as All About My Mother, which I can watch over and over again, and cry every time.
 
 
Naked Flame
09:00 / 28.08.02
SFD- yes, the injuries were real.

This blew my mind- we take it for granted that animal violence in film is simulated, don't we? Not so, in this case- I've seen some sources quoted as saying that at least six bulls were killed in filming.

More here.
 
 
Ariadne
09:16 / 28.08.02
Oh, grim - I assumed it was faked, too.
 
 
Shortfatdyke
09:21 / 28.08.02
Thanks, Flame, for the link and the information.

I'm really pissed off now, really angry that I went to see the film. I would never have done so if I'd known. During the bullfight scenes I assumed there was a law against harming animals during filming. Christ. I'm fucked off, far too angry to be more coherent...
 
 
Ariadne
09:30 / 28.08.02
I'm with you on that, shortfatdyke, pissed off and busy emailing everyone that I've told to see the film. Bugger.
 
 
Shortfatdyke
17:54 / 28.08.02
Okay. I e-mailed the Rio cinema today to express my disgust at the treatment of animals in the film. I just got a reply from the Director of the cinema, enclosing a copy of a press release:

"It has been brought to our attention that one or more animal rights
organisations have attacked Pedro Almodovar's new film TALK TO HER (Habla Con Ella). We are concerned that such organisations have formed an opinion, based on ignorance of the facts, that the production specifically organised the killing of bulls for a bullfighting scene in the film.

To put the record straight:
1. For the bullfighting scene, the production company filmed a regular
training session involving a novice ("novillero") bullfighter (the
actresses' face was subsequently superimposed through computer generated imaging).
2. The training session was conducted in accordance with all of the
requirements of the relevant local and regional government agencies in
Spain and all necessary permits and certificates were obtained by the
production company.
3. A complaint filed by the Madrid animal protection group 'Amnistia
Animal' with the environmental department of the Community of Madrid,
claiming that the film had violated animal protection laws, was rejected by the Community of Madrid in October 2001 on the basis that the claim was without legal foundation.
4. The British Board of Film Classification (BBFC) required extensive
documentation, including video footage, to satisfy themselves that nothing in the bullfighting scene was in breach of the Cinematograph Films (Animals) Act 1937 which guards against the mistreatment of animals specifically and solely for the purposes of creating a work of
entertainment. After concluding their thorough investigation, the BBFC
granted 'Talk To Her' a 15 certificate (uncut).

Pathé Distribution 22 August 2002"

What I assume that means is that the bullfighting was not put on directly for the filming, but that real bullfighting scenes were filmed. I'll be responding - to me it's splitting hairs, somewhat - the injuries and the blood pouring down the bull's backs were real. How they got there is somewhat beside the point.
 
 
Regrettable Juvenilia
19:15 / 28.08.02
So presumably incorporating documentary/unstaged footage into what is otherwise a fictional work is morally indefensible if that documentary footage involves animal suffering (and presumably human suffering too, although you never can tell)?

I can't believe it's that simple... But what do I know? BOYCOTT THIS SICK EURO FILTH NOW!
 
 
Lilith Myth
22:01 / 28.08.02
I just got back from this movie now, and didn't know the bulls' injuries were real. Circumstances of "real" don't actually matter to me; I would never go see a bullfight, so why would I watch one on screen? I feel slightly disturbed, now, but not as much as I was by the relationship of the nurse with the coma victim. While it was filmed in a non-judgemental way, there was something very clearly not OK about his obsession. Even though many of the other characters expressed disdain/anger with him, I've come home feeling... dirty in some way.

But I agree with Ariadne: it's really about loneliness, although Almodovar does labor that point with two separate dialogues about it.
 
 
Naked Flame
22:39 / 28.08.02
I can't believe it's that simple...

Well, if you value animal rights, whether in the abstract, with specific reference to preventing animal suffering, or as a political cause, it *is* that simple, surely.

There are rules against making animals suffer for our entertainment. Bullfighting happens to be exempt from these rules because of 'tradition'. Bully for 'tradition'. We have better ways to get our entertainment, surely? Almodovar could have faked the animals: he faked the humans instead. (hell, why not fake both?) As far as the human/animal dichotomy goes, Flybauer, there would surely be outrage if Almodovar had filmed and used the real-life deaths of six bullfighters.

The depiction of violence- to humans or to animals- can be appropriate. Look at 'Amores Perros' from last year. The difference with that was that the violence was faked, and that gave the film a place to stand, morally and directorially, that wouldn't have been otherwise available.
 
 
Spatula Clarke
00:34 / 29.08.02
So I take it nobody at the BBFC saw anything backwards in the fact that

the mistreatment of animals specifically and solely for the purposes of creating a work of
entertainment

can apply to a full-on, real life bullfight that the cameras just happened to witness as much as it can one put on purely for a movie? Funny, I though bullfighting was all about the 'entertainment'...
 
 
Shortfatdyke
05:46 / 29.08.02
Flybauer - Yes, it is that fucking simple. Are you serious? It was utterly unnecessary to use or show bulls with deliberate injuries. Have you seen the film? It wasn't a documentary about bullfighting, and there was no need to include those animals in that way. It was indefensible, or at least it should have been stated that those scenes were for real - I want the choice as to whether I spend my money watching cruelty to animals.
 
 
Shortfatdyke
06:39 / 29.08.02
Apologies for my extreme grumpiness on this, but I'm genuinely upset about this. And Flybauer, I'm really having difficulty understanding the point of your post - you seem to be suggesting racism on the part of anyone being against the bullfighting scenes. If that's the case, rest assured that I'd have the same reaction to any film showing animals with injuries - be it English, working class, or part of the Lesbian and Gay Film Festival.
 
 
Regrettable Juvenilia
10:05 / 29.08.02
I'm not suggesting racism at all - apologies for the flippant tabloid-parodying at the end of my post. What I'm querying is the idea that filming human or animal suffering (that was occurring anyway) for inclusion in a work of art/fiction automatically makes one so complicit in that suffering as to discredit said work. As an analogy, should war films never incorporate actual newsreel footage of battle etc, or is it okay to use existing footage as long as you don't film it yourself?

I'm not arguing that to do so isn't troubling or doesn't raise serious ethical questions. I think this is quite an interesting ethical quandary, but not one that can be damned as "that fucking simple" automatically. I haven't seen the film as yet (Almodovar blows hot and cold for me), but I can't imagine boycotting it for this reason.

Now, had the bullfights been put on specifically for the making of the film, I could understand the outage a little more - but it seems that one of the things that you're objecting to, sfd, is the fact that you were 'tricked' into watching it. So the immediately preferred situation (as opposed to the ideal one in which bullfighting does not take place at all) becomes one in which those bullfights took place anyway, but you didn't have to look at them - a sort of "out of sight, out of mind" scenario, almost. What's especially odd about this view is the way it overlooks the possibility that the film might increase public awareness of and objections to bullfighting - not having seen the film as yet I don't know how the scenes are portrayed, but since the general consensus seems that they were distressing, this seems distinctly plausible. In which case, by using real footage of bullfights the film is arguably making a much stronger case against the practice...
 
 
Naked Flame
11:22 / 29.08.02
the possibility that the film might increase public awareness of and objections to bullfighting

As I suggested with reference to Amores Perros, the only way I can imagine this working as a strategy in a work of fiction is for the violence to be simulated (in AP, this was explicitly stated at the start of the film.) A film-maker is not in a position to condemn or engage in consciousness-raising activities if ze is, in this case, using real deaths, real animals, when the pain the humans go through is pretend. IIRC, this argument came up in the cat killers thread a little while back. And it was a crock of shit there too. As far as I'm concerned this is a cow snuff movie. Unecessary suffering and death is not a shades-of-grey issue for me, and- blinkered as I am- I don't see how it can be made into one.

Flybauer, I don't wish to make this personal, but I find your argument facile in the extreme. It's like suggesting that John Woo should send a team out with Dubya's boys when the next round of Iraq kicks off to get a more authentic grain to his combat footage. Let's have real death, real blood on the screen, because hey, it's occuring anyway, right? Next time we have a torture scene, let's just phone Amnesty and get a list of Western-friendly oppressive regimes! Man, why did we spend all this time bothering with these cumbersome special effects people? Let's just shoot the fuckers with real bullets! They're only actors, after all.

Coming back to the topic abstract, by your argument there would be nothing wrong with Almodovar using footage of a real rape, surely? Just get to know a couple of regular offenders, tail them, wait for an attack, and CGI the actress' face on there. It's all about drawing awareness to a pre-existent problem. People get raped every day. Spot the problem in this paragraph.


The use of documentary footage is a totally separate issue to the filming of real-world violence specifically for this particular entertainment artifact. It should be immediately clear that there's a big difference between the slaughterhouse footage gathered and disseminated by many animal rights organisations- or the use of our visual records of human suffering- and the death of a sentient being for the purposes of entertainment.

Just look at Pathe's response quoted above by SFD- the distributors are getting away with this because they fulfil the letter of the law, but are clearly not interested in the spirit. They found themselves a little loophole to save a few thousand euros on CGI time and professional, cruelty-free animal handlers. Boycott the fucker, says I.
 
 
Regrettable Juvenilia
13:40 / 29.08.02
Coming back to the topic abstract, by your argument there would be nothing wrong with Almodovar using footage of a real rape, surely?

Because that's what I'm saying above, isn't it - that there's "nothing wrong" with what has been done. That'll be why I said explicitly "I'm not arguing that to do so... doesn't raise serious ethical questions."

For fuck's sake - never mind - I should remember never to discuss morality where children or animals are concerned...
 
 
Shortfatdyke
13:43 / 29.08.02
I've been reading a bit more about this, but basically I'd say that I try to live as ethical a life as possible. It really matters to me to do as much as I can to not be (as Flame put it a while ago) not part of the badness. Before I saw the film I was not unaware of the cruelty of bullfighting - my ethical decision would be not to watch, either directly (by going to a bullfight) or indirectly (seeing bullfighting on film with real animals being injured - unless it was a documentary about animal rights)) - which to me is partaking and supporting - being part of the badness. So, yes, I feel tricked, because Almodovar has certainly trod a very, very fine line around the law here. He bought bulls specifically for the filming. He directed the 'training session'. Story has it (don't know if it's true, of course, but it's part of Madrid's Animal Amnesty's action against the director) that a novice bullfighter basically butchered the animals.

I think the suggestion that I don't care if bullfights - cruelty - take place, as long as it's not in front of me, is actually pretty unfair.
 
 
Regrettable Juvenilia
14:25 / 29.08.02
That's not really what I was suggesting either - but moving on, because I do want to clarify something else...

Almodovar has certainly trod a very, very fine line around the law here. He bought bulls specifically for the filming. He directed the 'training session'. Story has it (don't know if it's true, of course, but it's part of Madrid's Animal Amnesty's action against the director) that a novice bullfighter basically butchered the animals.

If this *is* true, then I think what he did was pretty appalling - I wasn't aware that Almodovar bought the bulls, or directed the fight, and that does make it a lot harder to stomache and go beyond 'complicity' - it's really direct involvement.

I guess what interests me is this: you state above, sfd, that you wouldn't want to watch real footage of real bullfights "unless it was a documentary about animal rights", because it would make you somehow complicit in it. This is clearly a pretty common standpoint - though where we draw the line may vary, none of us would like to think we got a kick out of watching suffering - and to me this raises some fascinating issues about our relationship with and view of documentaries, reportage, basically any kind of non-fictional media representation of suffering. For example, to what extent does a documentary about animal suffering have to make a didactic case for animal rights in order to be validated in this manner? I'm not being flippant, because I think this is a genuine issue and has serious implications for how we think about, say, the News. (For example, I missed the recent Channel 4 documentary 'The House of War', about the uprising (and subsequent massacre) of alleged Al-Queda 'prisoners of war'/'enemy combatants' in a fortress in Afghanistan, but I know that the way in which events were presented and the line taken by the programme on what happened would definitely have affected my view of it, to the extent that were it extremely callous about Afghani lives, I would probably have felt very uncomfortable watching).

And things get even tricker when you start mixing fiction with non-fiction. But I guess we need a whole new thread to discuss this...
 
 
Loomis
10:11 / 30.08.02
I don't know that I have an all-encompassing standpoint on this, and as Flyboy says, it is a complicated issue drawing the line as regards complicity with actions that are taking place and with which we choose or are required to interact as part of either our daily life or our art.

I think what draws my focus here is not my forced complicity in watching the scene (hypothetically, as I've not seen it), but in supporting a group of people who have been complicit in the actions of the bullfighting community. Firstly, by interacting with them at all in order to obtain the footage, they are giving them a voice and validating what they do, as a "normal" part of society. Secondly, I presume they paid to use the footage, which makes it the same as buying seats in the bullring, in fact it's worse because they are creating/maintaining a secondary source of revenue for the bullfighters.

As Flame says, they could have faked it, so no matter whether or not bullfighting is happening anyway, the filmakers have chosen to do business with, and give money to people for what is in my opinion a criminal activity. Whether or not anyone believes they can twist what has been done to make it okay, the fact that there was an option that involved no interaction with the bullfighting community, and it was not taken, speaks for itself.

As with many animal rights issues, the concern is not simply about whether what we are currently doing is 12% cruel or 89% cruel; when we have an option that is 100% cruelty free, the debate is over.
 
 
Liloudini
16:00 / 30.08.02
I would like to say one thing before write about the movie: I don't like bullfighting and death fullfighting— like in Spain and unfortunately, like in my country, since last month— it's abominable and inominable to me.
I saw too Hable con ella three months ago.
I saw it like a movie about the loneliness, about the life— lived, sometimes, in the movie, through the others life— and about the short, lonely line between life and death— this cross all movie and all scenes. And it touched me very deeply and gave me, as usual, a vast world to think about, around the "eye" of Almodovar.
And I can say too that I already saw almost all the Pedro Almodovar movies.
He always have a critical and very incisive eye in his culture and I never saw any of his movies with unfounded options. He criticizes the church in a very incisive way— Spain always was a country where church have a major influence—, the prejudices, and all the thigs that characterizes his culture. And the bullfighting is a very deep tradition in Spain.In a movie where he shows death to talk about life maybe one of the actress being a bullfighter have the function of a strong symbol, not to despise. Yes, maybe he could use another way...maybe it's true...but another true he found in his culture a strong way to talk about all those fragile death/life oppositions (maybe they are not opposition at the end).
Related with priests episode in Africa I would like to say that it's clear to me that Almodovar always done an effective critic to the church...and usually the means are the less ortodoxe and ironic...anyone saw his Negros Habitos?

To finish I would like to say that it is for sure the movie where he had a major contention in the use of the visuality, loading it with deep symbols....to see more than one time!
 
  
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