A lover plays many roles, and one of them, for the most loving, is nurse. In his version of Sleeping Beauty, the great Spanish filmmaker Pedro Almodóvar imagines two couples: each woman in a coma, each man standing by, his ardor purified by her helplessness. Cynics may say this is how men want their women — beautiful, still, and silent — and that, for one of the men, devotion turns pretty quickly to deviation. But that’s to shortchange the grace and humor in this unpredictable, beautiful film. It imagines a world where love can be both obsessive and selfless, and where the common phrase “I care for you” can express a sacred mission.
What trouble can a furtive affair bring to the lovers? What misery can they cause their official partners? How do two ordinary cowpokes handle the kind of sexual fever they were taught to think is unnatural, and that could get them killed? Movies, searching for good guys and bad guys, rarely achieve a balance of sympathies between the ecstasy of sexual attraction and the pain of the people betrayed. Ang Lee’s film of the Annie Proulx story brilliantly articulates the unspoken; it gets the moviegoer’s pulse in synch with the beating of two — make that four — ravaged hearts. Unsentimental, unforgettable.
