Directed by Pedro Almodovar. 128 minutes.
Starring Penelope Cruz, Lluis Homar, Blanca Portillo, Ruben Ochandiano and Jose Luis Gomez. Released by Sony Pictures Classics.
When I hear the expression “the healing power of cinema,” I tend to roll my eyes. But there is no better way to describe Pedro Almodovar’s lush new film, Broken Embraces, which is about just that among other things – namely revenge, obsession and the third in a series of cinematic love letters to actress Penelope Cruz, though the actress plays more of a troubled soul than she did in the director’s All About My Mother or Volver. Almodovar’s latest, which has his trademark bright colors as well as the Hitchcockian thriller elements and characters plagued by their pasts as we have come to expect in his other pictures, does not break new ground and even if it does not quite hit the peaks of his other pictures this decade – Volver, Talk to Her and the remarkable Bad Education, it is still a solid additional to one of the most spectacular modern cinematic oeuvres.
The story is twisty and reveals pop up throughout its two-hour running time. The film opens with blind filmmaker Mateo (Lluis Homar0, also known as Harry Caine, who seems to have found a comfort zone by writing the occasional screenplay for his producer, Judit (Blanca Portillo), who appears to have a thing for him;, having casual sex with women he hardly knows; and mentoring a budding screenwriter and D.J. named Diego (Tamar Novas). His story is intercut with that of a 1992 tale in which struggling actress and hinted-at prostitute Lena (Penelope Cruz) attempts to pay her ailing father’s skyrocketing health care bills. Into her life comes “client” Ernesto (Jose Luis Gomez), a wealthy man who first marries her and then reluctantly agrees to not only support her acting career, but bankroll a film that is being shot by – you guessed it – Mateo, then at least a decade or so younger and with vision intact.
Things get complicated and several characters even give themselves alternate names. Mateo and Lena hit it off a little too well and strike up an affair on-set. Ernesto’s son (Ruben Ochandiano), who is gay but married twice, agrees to shoot the making of the film, which is a disguise for the fact that he is filming the director and actress as they carry on their tryst in an attempt to impress his hard-to-please father. Ernesto becomes increasingly obsessed with his wife’s carryings-on and hires a lip reader to decode Mateo and Lena’s off-set dialogue. All the while, Mateo’s film – a comedy that has some elements in common with Almodovar’s own Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown – starts to suffer.
Broken Embraces plays like a thriller, but – stop here if you don’t want anything to be spoiled – there is no killer, per se. It’s also a story filled with love, but much of it is unfulfilled, misdirected or unnoticed. In other words, this is not a love story, that is, unless you count it as a romance between Almodovar and cinema itself or an expression of the director to his luminous star, Cruz, who is occassionally filmed as a femme fatale from some film noir, complete with a blonde wig, and, at other times, like Audrey Hepburn – vulnerable and almost innocent. The film skirts the line of comedy, which is what you’d expect by looking at Almodovar’s body of work, and tragedy. At least several of the characters want that one thing they cannot have and even cross the line to prevent anyone else from having it. To go into great detail would result in my giving away some of the film’s many twists. But suffice it to say that Broken Embraces drops some bombshells that further deepen its characters without seeming too plot-oriented, with the exception of one scene.
At this point in the director’s career, I think most critics hold Almodovar to standards that are likely impossible to meet each time he steps behind the camera. Broken Embraces has been called a lesser work by several critics, while others have commented that the picture is merely a reliably-good addition to the Almodovar universe without treading new ground. But I see it as a filmmaker’s statement on the reliability of art – namely movies, in this case – to heal us amid the tragedies doled out to us all throughout a lifetime. Mateo overcomes some of his own traumas by continuing to create, despite the great cost that he previously paid to finish his works of art. Almodovar understands the amour fou involved in the making of films, which is why the movie, like all of his works, feels like such a labor of love and is so often such a joy to behold.