I’M ASHAMED TO ADMIT IT, BUT UP UNTIL LAST NIGHT, I’D ONLY SEEN ONE PEDRO ALMODOVAR MOVIE. And I grew up in Miami, where he’s one of the most popular filmmakers around! Almodovar shot scenes from “Live Flesh,” and “All About My Mother” there. Back in 1999, “All About My Mother” opened the Miami Film Festival, and became a bigger must-see event than “American Beauty.” Art house theatres constantly show his older movies, and there’s always a retrospective when the newest Almodovar gets released.

I did see one of his films: “Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown.” My high school Spanish teacher thought this would be a great way to immerse us in her language. I don’t know if the movie improved my Spanish any. It certainly didn’t convert me into an Almodovar fan, since I found the movie sort of juvenile. It was a hogdepodge of plotlines involving adultery and jilted females seeking revenge. I think a lot of women had a problem with it, since it depicted them as silly, man-clinging, overly emotional, and prone to excessive mascara.

Since I wasn’t impressed by “Women…,” I never saw another Almodovar flick. This was in spite of splendid reviews for “Kika,” (1992) “High Heels,” (1993) “Live Flesh,” (1997) and “All About My Mother.” (1999) Even after “...Mother” won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Picture, and my Spanish and non-Spanish speaking friends alike were telling me to either go to the theater or rent it, I still didn’t see it. But last night, on a whim, I decided to rent Almodovar’s highly-praised 2002 film “Habla Con Ella.” (“Talk to Her.”) Consider me officially converted.

”Habla Con Ella” won the 2002 Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay. It deserves it. “Habla Con Ella” also took home a statuette for Best Foreign Language Picture. While I’m not convinced that it’s superior to Zhang Yimou’s “Hero,” which was a sweeping, action-film epic, it’s at least on par. “Habla Con Ella” is a more intimate film; it's concerned with two men, Marco and Benigno, and their relationships with women.

Marco, a travel writer, is involved with a female bullfighter named Lydia. Her tough, athletic exterior hides a vulnerable heart which has recently been shattered. Benigno is infatuated with Alicia, an aspiring dancer who now lies in a vegetative state. Benigno is her nurse, and spends many hours talking to her about the operas he’s attended, the dances he’s seen. Who can be sure if Alicia can hear him, but Benigno believes that she can.

An accident brings Marco and Benigno together. As the two spend many a late hour conversing over the comatose Alicia, we find out things regarding Benigno that might strike one as disturbing. For example, he lives in an apartment that overlooks the dance studio Alicia had attended. Before the accident that caused her coma, he used to watch her through the glass windows of the studio. Once, he followed her home.

In a lesser filmmaker’s hands, Benigno would become Ed Gein, or Phillip Seymour Hoffman’s character from “Happiness.” An obsessed psycho. But we never become afraid of Benigno, or suspect that he’d do something terrible. We know he’s a silly romantic dreamer, the equivalent of the awkward high school outsider in love with the head cheerleader. If we cringe at some of the things he does, it’s because they’re risky, and we don’t want him to be caught. We know that Benigno is harmless. But would Alicia, who barely knows him, understand?

Benigno starts giving Marco relationship advice. Even though the pudgy nurse has only dealt with two women his entire life—his mother and Alicia—we suspect that there is wisdom and truth in what he says. But Marco doesn’t take the advice. He no longer feels the same closeness to Lydia. He cannot equal the passion that Benigno has with Alicia, even though Marco and Lydia have shared many more months of intimacy.

Clearly, Benigno has a much more fanciful, unrealistic view of love than Marco. But is that a bad thing? I don’t think Almodovar condemns hopeless, impossible love. I think he sees the beauty in it. At the same time, I think he believes that clinging to an impossible love, instead of accepting that it must end and moving on, ultimately destroys a person. Witness not only Benigno’s tragic fate, but the characters in the James Whale-style black and white “fake movie” in the middle of the film.

In this great-looking and funny “fake movie,” a vain scientist drinks a formula that is supposed to help him lose weight. Instead, it gradually shrinks him. So he leaves his beautiful scientist girlfriend, rather than force her to watch him slowly vanish from the earth. But the girlfriend finds him. She loves him even if he keeps getting smaller.

Even if the scientist girlfriend doesn’t acknowledge that their relationship is impossible to maintain, the shrinking scientist does. So he commits suicide. And for those who’ve seen the movie, yes, I think the suicide scene is one of the weirdest things ever filmed. I agree that it’s borderline pornographic. I can’t see how this movie managed to get an ‘R’ rating. But thank God it did so most videostores can carry it.

In the case of Marco, he had clues that things with Lydia were not going well, even before the accident. He might have pressed her for the truth then, but he didn’t. So Marco ends up humiliated, cast adrift, and possibly cuckolded.

And yet, this is not a depressing movie. It is an absorbing, intricately-written, beautifully photographed, exceptionally well-acted film. Of the three major twists in the second half—one disturbing, one unexpected, and the other seemingly unnecessary—all are handled maturely. Each takes the story in a different direction, but none of these changes feel phony. Maybe this is because the main characters are so well-composed that even if their actions are unexpected, they are understandable. Maybe it’s because Almodovar isn’t as interested in shock value as in the complexities of human relationships.

By the end of the movie, Benigno’s story will be front-page news. Only Marco doesn’t think he is a sick monster. But even if Benigno’s actions are reprehensible, they stem from feelings of genuine love. And the strange thing is, if he had been Alicia’s boyfriend or husband, what he did for her would have been considered as romantic as any Nicholas Sparks novel. But he isn’t. And since the act is so shocking, the public forgets its effect.

At the end of the movie, a minor character wants to talk to Marco about Benigno. Marco says they will talk. “It will not be as complicated as you think,” he says. He might be right. Benigno, to the end, was just a silly romantic. Everything he did, good or bad, he did for love.