Being a gay teen in southern Spain during the 1960s-a time when the Franco dictatorship was still going strong and Spanish society was one of the most repressive in the world-must have made writer-director Pedro Almodóvar hypersensitive to the plight of the outsider. His whole career has been based on identifying with the marginal and empathizing with those whom polite society would scorn.

Winner of the best film and best director awards at the European Film Awards last week, Talk to Her is firmly in the tradition of his earlier works. Beginning with a dance piece by Pina Bausch, during which we are visually introduced to our two main characters, Benigno (Javier Cámara) and the Argentine Marco (Darío Grandinetti), Almodóvar creates a narratively off-the-wall but strangely moving tale of two loners drawn together by profoundly weird coincidence.

For four years, Benigno, a nurse in a long-term care home, has been ministering to the needs of the lovely Alicia (Leonor Watling), a former dancer sent into a coma by a car accident. Marco is a journalist who falls for the female bullfighter Lydia (Rosario Flores), who, in an attempt to shock her bullfighting ex-lover, gives herself up to a bull and is herself rendered comatose. In a classic Almodóvar coincidence, the two women end up in the same home, where the lonely Benigno and the broken-hearted Marco recognize each other from the dance performance and begin a tentative friendship. But things escalate into melodrama (another regular Almodóvar trope) when the helpless Alicia is discovered to have been, to put it mildly, taken advantage of.

A kind of drenched romanticism suffuses the film, turning what is essentially a very creepy story into a humanist treatise on the strange nature of love and the admittedly bizarre ways in which that love is sometimes expressed. "Nothing is simple," mutters one of the characters and that seems to be Almodóvar's motto as well; while not exactly condoning how Benigno chooses to show his love for Alicia, Almodóvar insists on digging beneath the surface to try and come to grips with Benigno's nature. In doing so, he-and the audience-come to love Benigno's damaged soul, so that, in the end, Benigno's fate can't help but move you.

More complex and less sentimental than Almodóvar's breakthrough hit All About My Mother, Talk to Her also finds Almodóvar the visual stylist in top form. Beautiful vignettes abound, from a set piece that fetishizes the ritual donning of the bullfighter's costume to a black-and-white silent film-within-the-film (a version of The Incredible Shrinking Man that takes that premise to its logical conclusion on the love/sex front). A lovely singing cameo from Caetano Veloso-warmly and gracefully shot by Almodóvar-both enhances the film's humid romantic longing and serves as visual icing on the cake.