Darío Grandinetti gives troubled men enough feeling to make their company matter. His work in Talk to Her is moving and persuasive, though we remain wary of the film’s eagerness to forgive them.
Fi1m perspective
In Talk to Her (2002), Darío Grandinetti gives Marco a loneliness distinct from that of Javier Cámara’s Benigno. Cámara supplies much of the warmth, but neither performance reduces the two men to a shared predicament: caring for women in comas. We were moved by their closeness, and by the difficulty of separating care from need in their company. Grandinetti makes Marco worth attending to in his own right, rather than merely giving Benigno somebody to talk to.
Eliseo Subiela’s poetic drama El lado oscuro del corazón (1992), with Grandinetti as Oliverio, established him in Argentine cinema. Talk to Her became the international breakthrough, bringing more Spanish productions and co-productions without ending his work in Argentina. He reunited with Almodóvar as Lorenzo in Julieta (2016), their second film together. That continuing work across Argentina and Spain has included both dramas and dark comedies, a useful warning against treating Marco as the whole actor.
For us, Talk to Her is the place to start. Almodóvar’s melodrama asks us to accept unlikely events, and Grandinetti and Cámara give it the credibility it needs. When the director’s theatrical flourishes threaten to distract, there is still a friendship worth attending to. Our caveat concerns how readily the film asks us to forgive its men: making their needs understandable does not settle what we ought to think of them. Grandinetti’s persuasive performance leaves that reservation intact.
Wild Tales (2014), where he plays Salgado in the ‘Pasternak’ segment, offers the sharper, darkly comic side of his work. As Claudio in Rojo (2018), he makes use of an unsettling authority. Both suggest why casting him only for introspection would miss something useful. He has expressed interest in lighter comedy, though offers in that area have been fewer. We would happily see him given an evening with less to worry about.
Biography
Darío Grandinetti is an Argentine actor. He was born on 5 March 1959 in Rosario, Santa Fe.
He began his career in television before moving into film, with a filmography consisting largely of Argentine productions and co-productions. His first foreign film was the Bolivian production El día que murió el silencio (1998). Grandinetti is known for his role as Marco in Pedro Almodóvar’s Talk to Her (2002) and for appearances in Wild Tales (2014), Julieta (2016) and the series Maradona, Blessed Dream (2021). He has also worked in Spanish films and television series.
