Narrative

Pepe and the Narrative

The narrative follows a broken line, which mustn’t be noticed.That was the most difficult thing in this never-ending shoot.I’m used to mixing tones, genres, universes, but I’d never played so much with time, a few kitsch (and Hitchcockian) flashbacks in “Labyrinth of Passion,” but not much else.

Here time passes in several directions, and the main action is interrupted by the

appearance of other actions with their own significance, the dances at the beginning and the end, Caetano’s performance, the appearance of “Shrinking Lover,” etc. All those elements had me on tenterhooks until the last minute.

I never presume that things will turn out as I plan, however hard I work at it and however much every member of the team does exactly what I ask of him or her.I need to stick one image to another, and that one to the next, in order to see that what I wanted to tell is actually there.For better or worse, the editing is a box of surprises.

Broken time and a mixture of various narrative units work better when the action is more mental or interior, or happens in another dimension, as in David Lynch’s films; in this kind of fantastic neo-realism, or naturalism of the absurd in which I move, plot ruptures can mean a jolt for the spectator who had become fond of a character and a story, and then I pull at him, I drag him away and force him to follow another character and another story.

Thanks to the wise and omnipresent editor Pepe Salcedo, “Talk to Her” overcomes all those difficulties and is, or so I believe, a complex film which, however, seems simple and transparent. For content, I tend more and more towards emotions, and for the container, transparency.