Broken Embraces: movie review
No contemporary movie director has worked the history of film into his own films as lavishly as Pedro Almod贸var. He presents you with a pageant of allusions, riffs, and homages, and no more so than in his latest, 鈥�Broken Embraces.鈥�
He also, increasingly, references his own movies. In 鈥淏roken Embraces,鈥� which stars Pen茅lope Cruz as an actress who drives both her smitten director and her producer to dangerous distraction, he carries the gambit much further than ever before. It鈥檚 a movie about a movie director, and it even features a film within a film 鈥� actually, it鈥檚 a film within a film within a film 鈥� that is clearly meant to invoke his most popular success, 鈥�Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown.鈥�
I still consider that giddy, knockabout 1988 movie his best, but in the intervening years he has become far more serioso, and this is true of his filmic models as well. Whereas 鈥淲omen鈥� drew on Hollywood slapstick classics and satirized (and reveled in) sob sister melodramas of the Joan Crawford variety, he is now much more likely to plunge headfirst into film noir. As always, Almod贸var鈥檚 game plan is twofold: He wants us to recognize the same movies he does, but he also wants to subvert them 鈥� make them his own. He wants to get at the dramatic heart of melodrama.
What Almod贸var is doing is not so very different from what French New Wave directors like Jean-Luc Godard and Fran莽ois Truffaut attempted in their early films. Movies like 鈥淏reathless鈥� and 鈥淪hoot the Piano Player鈥� were fantasias based on beloved hard-boiled Hollywood models. These directors pulled poetry out of pulp, and yet they somehow still managed to preserve pulp鈥檚 punch.
All of this is a roundabout way of saying that, during vast sections of 鈥淏roken Embraces,鈥� I wished I was watching the actual old-time noirs instead of the miasmic concoction that Almod贸var has made from them. He鈥檚 lost much of his playfulness as a director and in its place is a chichi somberness that many have mistaken for art.
Artfulness is more like it. 鈥淏roken Embraces鈥� glides back and forth from past to present with a supernal fluidity, and it offers many near-abstract images of extraordinary delicacy (my favorite: a close-up of a teardrop running down the side of a tomato). But the center of the drama is also abstract, and in ways that are often vague and dimensionless. This film within a film never quite takes on a life of its own.
Three characters predominate: Mateo Blanco (Llu铆s Homar) is a blind screenwriter and former director who lost his sight in a car accident. Now, many years later, he answers only to the name Harry Caine, the pseudonym he used as a screenwriter. Flashbacks feature Lena (Cruz), the actress, a sometime call girl and secretary, later mistress to a wealthy industrialist, Ernesto Martel (Jos茅 Luis G贸mez). He finances her Mateo-directed movie but his jealousy is so all-consuming that he has his son (Rub茅n Ochandiano) covertly film Mateo and Lena and then hires a lip reader to decipher their sweet nothings.
This pr茅cis is only a tidbit of the entire story line, which involves all sorts of double- and triple-whammies played out across decades. If you鈥檙e a diehard cin茅aste, the pileup of movie homages (鈥淜iss of Death,鈥� 鈥淧eeping Tom,鈥� etc.) has its attractions. But the film-drenched romanticism quickly turns soggy. It doesn鈥檛 help that Mateo is an impassive sufferer, or that Lena, despite being played by an actress who can hold the screen as few others can, is more a noir vamp compendium than a character. Memo to Almod贸var: There鈥檚 more to life 鈥� and to movies 鈥� than movie love. Grade: B (Rated R for sexual content, language, and some drug material.)
