My current wisecrack about Pedro Almodóvar’s new movie, Talk to Her, is that it lacks the usual transvestite or transsexual, so I can’t find the moral centre of the film. But then Almodóvar has always had a nice line in moral ambiguity. In that respect, he is today’s great European corrective to Hollywood’s join-the-dots moral schemata. And Talk to Her does indeed ask questions about how good things can come of evil deeds; and how then are we to judge the evil deed?Talk to Her revolves around two comatose women and the men in their lives. The two men we meet in the very first scene, in which they are sitting next to each other watching a contemporary dance performance. One of them has tears running down his face; the other gazes at him in surprise. It is an image typical of Almodóvar, striking in its directness as well as its lurking implications — a tear-stained face looking directly at us, as though we were the performance and not the audience. But, of course, we are the audience as well, and we are being pulled into that emotional space, that ability to react with feeling to art. And, on top of that, we are also represented by the man who looks on quizzically. The two men (who will later meet under other circumstances) are very different. Marco (Dario Grandinetti), the one seen weeping, is a successful travel-writer and journalist; Benigno (Javier Cámara) is a plump, sexually ambiguous and notably dysfunctional figure. (To my mind, they represent different aspects of the Almodóvar psyche, but that’s another thesis. ) The women with whom these men are involved — and I mean involved in the fully complex sense of that word — are themselves interesting figures: a female bullfighter (Rosario Flores) and a dancer (Leonor Watling). The fact that these supremely physical women are reduced to immobility is one of the film’s saddest ironies, but the irony also extends to Almodóvar’s inversion of the usual opposition of male physicality and female emotionalism. None of that, however, says much about how the story proceeds — how Almodóvar seems to put the narrative together in an almost casual way, and yet nothing seems irrelevant or extraneous. Even a scene of a party (apparently shot at Almodóvar’s own house, at one of his arty parties), which could look like an unnecessary interpolation, has a powerful purpose. The song sung by the Brazilian great Caetano Veloso to the guests raises the emotional temperature considerably; it sends a shiver down the spine, and seems in many ways to be the emotional cynosure of the movie. Almodóvar’s films have often mixed farce and soap opera; his outrageousness sits alongside melodrama, and sometimes they blend better than at other times. Talk to Her is one of his least bizarre movies (as the absence of any transvestites or transsexuals implies), though it lacks nothing in wit, and one of its strongest sections is an amazing film-within-a-film — a pastiche of a black-and-white silent surrealist short. It’s as odd and shocking as any early Almodóvar moment, but it also tells us something vital about Benigno, and is an elegant solution to the problem of how movies show us the interior life of characters. Yes, Talk to Her is, in some ways, melodrama, even soap opera, but Almodóvar dignifies the genre. Like Marco at the dance performance, we weep, and there’s no shame in it.