Almodóvar's loving inclusion of this material - later, another gorgeous Bausch performance will be used as a second bookend - plays almost as an admission of a certain shortcoming, a concession that narrative cinema, no matter how flamboyant or obstinately provocative, never operates on quite the same level of evocative minimalism at which the dance exists. Thus having established a mood of great sadness and beauty that will inform everything that comes afterward, Almodóvar cuts away to a shot of two men in the audience. One of them is silently weeping. The other glances at him sideways. Our expectation, surely, is that these two men have come to the performance together. Perhaps they are lovers - or maybe that's just a prejudice that I brought to the movie, along with the knowledge that Almodóvar himself is gay. Probably I was thinking of Exotica, another sublimely puzzling chamber drama that deals adeptly with curious emotions, and which features a lonely gay man attending the ballet with a temporary companion.

The joke is on me, then - only the first of several jokes in a gorgeous, elaborate pattern of them - as Talk to Her purports to be all about the way men relate to women. (Of course, whether the film represents itself honestly must remain an open question.) The two men we see aren't together at all, and are quite heterosexual in their behavior. We learn about their lives in fits and starts, as the narrative flits casually backward and forward in time, spooling out memories so adeptly that I at first mistook some of them for dream sequences. (There is a dream sequence, in fact - and probably it's something more than that - that comes disguised as an old Spanish silent film.) The temporal displacement is jarring at first, but, like Egoyan, Almodóvar is exceedingly skilled at placing events in exactly the narrative context where they make the most sense. The cumulative effect is one of exceeding delicacy, a sublime appeal to the emotions rather than the intellect.

And, OK, as intellect goes, Talk to Her is a black comedy. Like other Almodóvar films (Kiki comes immediately to mind), it delights in its scandals. But its sensitivities are extravagant, which means it's one of the most beautiful black comedies ever made. Here, Almodóvar films material that verges on soap opera, or a parody of soap opera, with great richness of feeling. The crying man, Marco (Darío Grandinetti), is a writer grown intimate with one of his subjects - Lydia (Rosario Flores), a dashing bullfighter on the rebound from fellow toreador Niño de Valencia (Adolfo Fernandez). The fidgety one is Benigno (Javier Cámara), a sad-eyed mama's boy (and nurse by trade) who's never been on a date in his life but who pines after Alicia (Leonor Watling), a young ballerina on whom he spies from a window of his mother's house.

Long story short, Alicia is knocked into a coma by traffic on a rainy day; Lydia is gored by a bull and winds up in the same state. Alicia winds up under nurse Benigno's care at the same Madrid hospital where Marco frets over Lydia just down the hall. Benigno calls out one day to Marco, whom he recognizes from Café Mueller, and strikes up a conversation. On the subject of women in comas, Benigno is full of advice. "Talk to her," Benigno urges his new friend, with great earnestness, though Marco can't summon the words. As will be shown in one of several tidy ironies that Almodóvar layers on top of the story, that's more than friendly advice. It's an imperative.

Despite a welcome playfulness Almodóvar brings to the story, the gravity of his subject remains clear. At some level, it's a movie about storytelling itself, and it works in part because I haven't seen a film this year that's any more accomplished in its narrative technique. Almodóvar clearly delineates his characters, and cinematographer Javier Aguirresarobe (he made a great subject of Nicole Kidman in Alejandro Amenabar's The Others) shoots them in 'scope with a delicate depth of field that lends a sad beauty to each of them. Flores makes a strong impression in just a few scenes as the incredibly tightly laced Lydia, a woman in a man's, man's, man's, man's world whose eventual worst-case-scenario is the swap she makes for her freedom and dignity. Almodóvar privileges us with a scene showing her dress in a snug bullfighter's costume - the crisp, athletic elegance of her character evident in the way she wears those clothes - in preparation for her own kind of dance performance. It's no wonder journalist Marco is first intrigued, then smitten.

Marco is passive, jabbering endlessly about his own life when in Flores' presence but at her mercy when it comes to the boundaries of their relationship. And when she is comatose before him, he loses that voice. Benigno, on the other hand, holds confident sway over his little ballerina, who lies immobile, unfeeling and unaware in her hospital bed. Almodóvar's angles on her body emphasize the odd serenity of her position. She is both the recipient of non-stop kindness from Benigno, who expertly washes and massages her from head to toe while speaking to her gently and openly, as though to an old friend. But she is also a helpless receptacle for that tenderness. The point is made clear by weirdly erotic images of her pale and paralyzed body as she is dressed and undressed, underscoring the perfectly voyeuristic position of the men who visit her. For Benigno, whose definition of love is unformed and monodirectional, it's an ideal relationship.

The moral question at hand is whether it's an innocent relationship - or, more specifically, with what degree of purity of motive does Benigno act? Ever the provocateur, Almodóvar has designed the question to be difficult and maybe even galling. We learn the depth of Benigno's obsessions only a little at a time, and while Almodóvar doesn't mask his increasing creepiness, it is presented with a remarkable lack of judgment. In a lesser film, one where perversion exists for the simple sake of catalyzing a garden-variety arthouse bummer, Benigno might be written as a standard-issue psycho. But Camara invests him with a dreamy earnestness that renders his naive emotions as childlike as they are overwhelming. He's the film's idiot philosopher, articulating essential notions about relations between the genders while succumbing to his own delusional feeling. And his depravity becomes Talk to Her's most perplexing irony.

What I mean by that is that Talk to Her is not an amoral film, but it is one that questions ideas about morality. It's simultaneously mournful and mischievous. It's a film that continuously underscores the importance of speech, of words, but it's also one where the two characters who finally find happiness do it in almost absolute silence, nothing more than wide, generous smiles guiding their way.