Broken Embraces
DIR/WRI: Pedro Almodóvar • PRO: Esther García • DOP: Rodrigo Prieto • ED: José Salcedo • DES: Antxón Gómez • CAST: Penélope Cruz, Lluís Homar, Ángela Molina, Lola Dueñas
Broken Embraces is Spanish auteur Pedro Almodóvar’s seventeenth film and it will neither disappoint nor surprise fans. It is his longest film yet and it returns from the maternal warmth of Volver (2006) back to the noir-hued style of Bad Education (2004).
The plot is complex and sophisticated and Almodóvar is clearly stretching himself technically and conceptually. The action unfolds in two different periods, the present and 1992–2004, and there is a film within a film, the making of which is also being filmed within the film. In present day Madrid, a blind scriptwriter Harry Caine (Lluís Homar) hears from a pretentious young filmmaker, ‘Ray X’, who, he realises, is linked to the tragic events that led to his loss of sight and the loss of his lover, Lena (Penélope Cruz). Working previously as a call girl and then marrying Ernesto Martel (José Luis Goméz), her rich elderly boss, she predictably begins an affair with the director who in the early strand of the story is called Mateo Blanco (later Harry Caine) and has his full sight. Martel’s gay acned son spies for his father under the pretence of making a behind-the-scenes documentary about the film Blanco is directing, Girls and Suitcases. The plot elaborately unfolds into a kind of meta-noir, which requires more concern for the characters than the film can inspire.
There are plenty of cinematic references for the spotting, if that’s your cup of tea, including Henry Hathaway’s 40s noir Kiss of Death and Rossellini’s Voyage to Italy. The film within the film is perhaps a self-reflexive look back to his own Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown. As fans will expect, Broken Embraces has a rich, vivid palette and the style and premise are the product of an infatuation with cinema itself.
In art as in life, total consensus is generally an unhealthy and suspicious thing. Trawling through dozens of reviews, in an attempt to find some critical variation in response to a film which appears to me to have many profound problems, I encountered only moments of deviation from otherwise uninterrupted adoration. Any mutinous notions suggested were instantly qualified with reminders that ‘even at his worst’ Almodóvar is still a superior director to just about anything else Europe has to offer. So here are a few gaping holes in the film which I would like to put out into the world in the hope that someone else is looking around wondering if they are missing something. Lena’s so called ‘fragmented’ character is nothing more than an absence of character dressed up in different costumes and all the references and hollow post-modern concepts in the world won’t make it otherwise. The plot and the characters are instantly forgettable, due to the shallowness of their conception, and even during the film it is difficult to stay focussed on the labyrinthine plot because it is impossible to really care what happens to any of the characters. The whole experience feels like listening to a very fast twenty-minute guitar solo: it forces you to concede to and admire its technical prowess but it leaves you cold. The film contains lots of flattering shots of a very attractive actress (Penélope Cruz) in different outfits and will leave a lot of middle-aged film critics fantasies pandered to, but it all simply lacks heart and substance. It is a film about passion that utterly lacks passion. Visually, this film is very beautiful and lush. Technically, it is characteristically artful and considered but in this lone critic’s opinion that is not enough.
Angela Nagle
(See biog here)
Rated 15A (See IFCO website for details)
Broken Embraces is released on 28th August 2009
Broken Embraces – Official Website
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