After what appeared to be a grand summation of Pedro Almodóvar’s career in the Oscar-winning Todo sobre mi madre/All About My Mother — a generous, all-encompassing valentine to his usual characters and themes — his latest, Hable con ella/Talk to Her, seems like an austere dropoff. It has a streamlined plot and a hospital-clean look befitting its somber subject. Yet the film is curiously lightweight, as nimble and ethereal as the ballet dancers who populate it. That curious, precarious balance of tone is a rare and admirable gymnastic feat, but to what end?

Almodóvar has long depicted love affairs that challenge boundaries, usually the ones imposed by gender preference or sexual orientation. Here he has a romance whose biggest obstacle is that one of the partners is comatose. Not that Alicia (Leonor Watling) had any inkling of the feelings Benigno (Javier Cámara) had for her before a traffic accident put her into a vegetative state. He had observed her from afar, through the window of her dance studio, but he’d hardly spoken to her. Now, as he cares for her at the hospital, he talks to her constantly, obeying the injunction of the film’s title. See, communication is essential to any relationship.

In a parallel plot line, journalist Marco (Darío Grandinetti) becomes infatuated with a woman he’s assigned to write about, the female matador Lydia (Rosario Flores). In a reversal of stereotypical sex roles, he becomes servile in the presence of the lady bullfighter. She appreciates the attention but can’t return his affection because she’s still pining for an ex-boyfriend. After a bull-ring injury puts Lydia in the hospital, Marco finds himself in the same position as his new friend, Benigno, though unlike Benigno he can’t bring himself to lavish endless affection on someone who isn’t able to return or even acknowledge it.

This sounds like depressing fare, but in Almodóvar’s hands, it’s surprisingly airy, both deliberate and playful at the same time. He hasn’t abandoned the mechanics of sexual farce that characterized his movies in the ’80s and early ’90s, he’s merely channeled them toward more dramatic purposes. Talk to Her is full of humor in unexpected places, most notably in its centerpiece, a silent film that Benigno watches called The Shrinking Lover. In this improbable black-and-white artifact, a scientist reduces her boyfriend to Lilliputian size, at which point he gives Talk to Her its most delightfully raunchy punch line.

Nonetheless, Almodóvar is working toward something more profound, in measured, albeit seemingly wayward, steps. It’s in his languid, chaste yet sensual attention to gesture and detail, in the treatment his camera (operating, like Benigno, somewhere between gentleness and fetishism) gives to such rituals as the bathing of Alicia’s body, or Lydia’s donning of her bejeweled toreador suit. Most of all, it’s in the performance of Javier Cámara, who plays the seemingly benign Benigno as a teddy-bear eunuch, apparently harmless but overstuffed to the bursting point with compassion and longing. (Credit should also go to the other performers: Grandinetti, whose Marco is not nearly as confident and self-assured as he thinks he is; Flores, who cuts a striking, tempestuous figure both in and out of the ring; and even Watling, who surprises with what is surely the liveliest portrayal of a coma patient since Glenn Close in Reversal of Fortune.)

If Talk to Her ultimately seems a lesser, more subdued work than what Almodóvar had built toward during his mature period, that’s not because the director has lost his nerve. He’s still seeing just how far he can push; the film culminates in an act of nonconsensual sex that, though it takes place off screen, will probably repulse anyone who was offended by the director’s Kika or Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! As in those movies, the perpetrator is motivated not by violence but by a desperate excess of love.

If that sounds hard to swallow, consider that Almodóvar’s compassion for even his most misguided characters and his matter-of-factness make it go down a lot easier. Besides, he’s less interested in justifying the act than in using it as a pretext to ask the questions he always asks. Where is the line between desire and obsession? What are the limits of devotion? Is there such a thing as too much love? And how do you know when to let go?