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PRIVACY AND SPECTACLE
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In Todo sobre mi madre there was a poster of Pina in
Café Müller (it was hanging on a wall in
Cecilia Roth's son's room). I didn't know then that
that choreographic piece would be the prologue to my
next film. At the time I only wanted to pay homage to
the German choreographer.
When I finished writing Talk To Her and looked at Pina's
face again, with her eyes closed, and at how she was
dressed in a flimsy slip, her arms and hands outstretched,
surrounded by obstacles (wooden tables and chairs),
I had no doubt that it was the image which best represented
the limbo in which my story's protagonists lived. Two
women in a coma who, despite their apparent passivity,
provoke the same solace, the same tension, passion,
jealousy, desire and disillusion in men as if they were
upright, eyes wide open and talking a mile a minute.
Around that time, I saw Masurca Fogo in Barcelona and
was struck by its vitality and optimism, its bucolic
air and those unexpected images of painful beauty which
made me cry, like Marco, from pure pleasure. Not to
mention the "sighing beginning", which I had
to reduce for narrative reasons. I'm referring to the
beginning of the piece: A woman (Ruth Amarante) appears
on a diaphanous stage, her hair is hanging loose and
she's wearing an ankle length flowered dress. She picks
up a 70s style microphone and holds it up to her mouth.
It looks as if she's going to sing or talk, but she
doesn't do either. After filling her lungs with air
in a suspense-filled silence, she lets out a long, deep
sigh. This is followed by another sigh... and another.
Masurca Fogo begins with the sadness of the absent
Benigno (the sighs) and unites the surviving couple
(Marco and Alicia) through a shared bucolic emotion:
several couples are dancing in the country to the rhythm
of a Cabo Verde mazurca, also accompanied by the sound
of a little waterfall which flows miraculously from
the grass in all its splendor.
If I had asked for it specifically I couldn't have
got anything better. Pina Bausch had unknowingly created
the best doors through which to enter and leave Talk
To Her.
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