From that point on, she knows he's seeing another woman -- except she only knows half the story. As the husband, Alberto, Jordi Molla is impressive as a man of basically decent instincts who is so repressed and so used to lying that he hardly knows who he is or what he wants. He loves his wife, he loves his son, and he also loves Diego, a gay orthopedic surgeon played by Javier Bardem ("Before Night Falls"). Alberto has spent his life censoring his words and controlling his impulses to the extent that he never seems truly spontaneous, except in bed. In keeping with the recent trend in European cinema, the sex scenes here are pretty raw; that is, the gay sex. Some discerning cineastes might assert that we really do need to see these guys slamming into each other to know they're in a relationship.
Even if so, there have been cases of people having sex under the covers. These European filmmakers might give us and their actors a break by letting them try it some time. The sex scene is the film's one exploitative lapse, a calculated shock in a picture whose loving respect for its characters is plain. Three characters are in hell and there's nothing to be done. We might wish Alberto had it in him to go ahead and declare his major, but he's incapable. He's in love with whichever partner he's with. Molla doesn't do the easy thing of courting our indulgence by taking us into Alberto's pain. Instead he holds us, like his lovers, at arm's length, so that we, like them, have to wonder whether he's genuinely tormented or just manipulative and self-indulgent. The gradual penetration of Alberto's mystery is, in a sense, the picture's narrative through-line. While Molla has to hold back, his co-stars don't. Bardem is a great emotional actor, with a face that can seem at once handsome, clownlike, delicate and primitive. He leaves us in no doubt that Alberto is the love of Diego's life. Diego is not the villain. Neither is the wife, who, as played by Gil, lets us see the wife's desolation at discovering that she has been sharing her life with a stranger. Also in the cast is Cecelia Roth, a mainstay of Pedro Almodovar's films, who has a small but choice role as Diego's business partner -- a divorced, middle-aged professional who would have an affair with Diego in a minute, if only he were as confused as Alberto.
