Directed by: Pedro Almodóvar
As Almodóvar settles into the midpoint of an already illustrious career, his work has achieved a happy balance between the whiz-kid pyrotechnics of his early days as a filmmaker and the more mature, measured style of his recent films.
Broken Embraces sits somewhere between the two. In addition to a dense, labyrinthine narrative that jumps across time periods, it also features some fiercely contested, complex relationships.
Furthermore, the master proves that he has lost none of his skill in managing the demands of a film that touches on his own métier.
At the centre of this affecting feature sits a blind screenwriter and former director who has abandoned his real name, Mateo Blanco, for a pseudonym, Harry Caine, the first sign of the double life he leads. Harry's current reality conceals a fascinating past, which Almodóvar spends much of his film detailing. The plot is propelled by the arrival of a brash young man, hot on the heels of news that the producer of Mateo's film “Girls and Suitcases” has died. The film marked a defining period in Mateo's life, as both he and his producer had fallen madly in love with a girl who was cast in the project. The simmering Lena had turned both of their worlds inside out. She became the love of Mateo's life while simultaneously leading a double life with the film's producer. But it is the young man on his doorstep that intrigues and troubles the now blind Harry. Who is he?
Almodóvar skilfully and effortlessly uncovers the secrets of everyone's various pasts in this steamy, scheming and oh-so-romantic melodrama. Penélope Cruz continues to broaden her palette as a dramatic and comedic actress, turning the coquettish Lena into a fully rounded and completely sympathetic schemer, while Lluís Homar, best known for his role in Bad Education, is both dignified and skittish in the double role of Harry/Mateo. Almodóvar's witty, well-written screenplay provides the intricate canvas on which this very Spanish dance of life and death is played out.
Review
ByHarvey Karten
If you’ve ever wondered why our Creator did not situate our brains in our loins, the answer is simple. He did not have to, since most of our thinking comes from there anyway. This is true in “Broken Embraces,” which has all the elements of soap opera melodrama: raging jealousy, betrayal, a need for security, identity conflict, irreverent and dark humor. Soap opera has these as well, but Almodovar is an artist who caters to cinephiles by affording us films within his film to reference and to challenge our memories, including an element of his 1988 feature “Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown,” which was also his first mainstream comedy. Allusions to Henry Hathaway’s “Kiss of Death” and Rossellini’s “Voyage to Italy”—they’re in the film as well, but you don’t have to be aware of these references fully to enjoy Almodovar’s latest. There’s enough humor in this complex-plotted work, which shifts in time from 1992 to 2008, from Madrid to Ibiza to the unusual, lava-soaked Spanish island of Lanzarote.
Nor does it hurt that he put the gorgeous Penelope Cruz in one of the two leading female roles, a sizzling brunette who appears to have not aged since Fina Torres’s year 2000 work, “Woman on Top.” As Lena, Cruz is the love interest of two men, one a rich villain who had built up a successful corporation in Madrid, the other a younger fellow, a director who makes his living as a screenwriter. Henry Caine (Lluis Homar), who during most of his life was known as Mateo Blanco, had become blinded in 1994 in what looks like a premeditated auto accident. Fourteen years later, he learns that his chief rival for Lena’s affection, Ernesto Martel (Jose Luis Gomez), had died a man who had produced the Blanco film “Girls and Suitcases” (a takeoff on Almodovar’s “Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown”).
When Ray X (Ruben Ochandiano) requests that Blanco write a screenplay for a film he wants to direct, one which will puncture the persona of the dead father who allegedly ruined his life, he is sent packing by Blanco. This prepared the audience for Almodovar’s twists and turns, all of which will come later with a final blowout near the tale’s conclusion.
A film partly about the making of films, “Los abrazos rotos” as it is known in its original Spanish features an effeminate young man who has been ordered to film Lena’s every move, a tape that is watched by a jealous Martel who uses the services of a lipreader to describes passionate conversations in a comically emotion-free monologue.
Jose Salcedo’s editing keeps the action flowing from 1992 to the present, all filmed by Rodrigo Prieto in Madrid and in the unusual island of Lanzarote. Considerable work has gone into the details, particularly in a collage of ripped photos which are about to be put together by Diego (Tamar Novas), the son of Blanco’s former production manager, Judit (Blanca Portillo); a young man who gets the surprise of his life in one of the plot’s many twists.
The mayhem is limited to a car crash that comes out of nowhere and is likely to effectively jolt many in the audience, and a push down the stairs by an insanely jealous lover who has little idea how much he is hated by the woman he adores. The dialogue, much of which is witty, clever and fast, is first-rate Almodovar. Penelope Cruz, playing at once a secretary, a would-be actress, a call-girl, and a reluctant girlfriend, is stunning: but you already knew that.