Broken Embraces

Pedro Almodóvar’s latest, Broken Embraces, feels so steeped in the auteurist universe of its creator that one wonders what it would be like to experience it as a solitary entity, divorced from any previous knowledge of the acclaimed filmmaker’s established themes, obsessions, and stylistic peccadilloes. Would the film’s swirl of role-playing, melodrama, memory, color, and cinema worship feel as rich and complicated without an understanding of how Almodóvar’s treatment of these elements conforms to, and varies from, his past efforts? Conversely, might it all feel a little more revelatory if not for that nagging sense of familiarity that periodically crops up throughout Broken Embraces: the feeling that, no matter how skilled the guide, we’ve walked these gorgeously-composed, emotionally-ambivalent paths before? It’s a bit of both, really. Perhaps this is simply the double-edged sword of auteurist thinking, which simultaneously honors a director’s return to recurring ideas and images and grows suspicious when these career-spanning patterns do not mature with each passing film.

This sense of directorial insularity prevents Broken Embraces from being a great film; one never gets the sense of the director truly pushing his customary tics and trademarks in a bold new direction. But as a vivid sampling of what Almodóvar does best—as well as an occasional reminder of his flaws—it’s entrancing, ruminative, and often ridiculously gorgeous. The film feels less like a greatest-hits album than an artfully-considered remix. You recognize the individual components while still marveling at the unexpected ways in which they complement one another when arranged in a (slightly) new way.

Broken Embraces follows Harry Caine (Lluis Homar), a blind screenwriter and former filmmaker who spends his days brainstorming scripts when he’s not seducing random women (as we see in the film’s opening). He’s looked after by his put-upon former production manager Judit (Blanca Portillo) and her grown son, Diego (Tamar Novas). Soon after hearing of the death of famed stockbroker Ernesto Martel (Jose Luiz Gomez), Harry receives a script from Martel’s disgruntled gay son, Ray X (Ruben Ochandiano), a thinly-veiled roman à clef against his homophobic father. How is Harry connected to Martel and his son? What caused his blindness, and why (as he tells us early on via voiceover) did he change his name from Mateo Blanco to Harry Caine? And how does Almodóvar muse Penélope Cruz—featured so prominently in the film’s luscious poster—fit into all of this? All is revealed in a series of flashbacks, in which Harry tells Diego of his former filmmaking career; the making of his would-be masterpiece, Girls and Suitcases (which borrows heavily from Almodóvar’s own Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown); and his affair with the film’s lead actress, Lena (Cruz), who also happens to be Martel’s mistress.

For all the hot-blooded twists that course through Almodóvar’s script—full of secrets, lies, tragic deaths, a near-fatal overdose and enough late-film confessions to make a Desperate Housewives staff writer blush—Broken Embraces strikes a balance between emotional appeals and distanced self-reflexivity. Like so many of Almodóvar’s films, it has its histrionics and deconstructs them too; and Broken Embraces feels even more like it’s aiming for the head over the heart than usual. It’s not that the film doesn’t have its moving moments—particularly the growing warmth that develops between Harry and Diego over the course of the film—but Almodóvar, intentionally or not, doesn’t juxtapose them as effortlessly as he has in his best films of the past few years (for my money, All About My Mother and Bad Education). His growing penchant for deluging the viewer with expository detail during the film’s final scenes (seen here as well in Volver) has the questionable effect of making us acutely aware of plot mechanics, rather than fully enveloping us within the narrative’s climax.

Then again, that might be the point. By placing a bit of space between us and the characters, it gives us the room to consider Broken Embraces’ principal thematic concern: the power of the cinematic image to shape and create emotional truth. Images dominate the film, from the footage of Girls and Suitcases to the obsessive documentation of that film’s making by Ray X (then a pimply-faced teenager shunned by his father) to the enormous paintings that line the walls of Martel’s home. Film becomes the filter through which life is understood, revealing certain truths even as it conceals others. And when Harry is finally given the opportunity to return to Girls and Suitcases after losing creative control years earlier, it underscores Broken Embraces’ poignant double vision of cinema as both objective record of the past and a powerful method of determining how it is remembered.

Of course, Broken Embraces is an unapologetic aesthetic delight, with Almodóvar and DP Rodrigo Prieto producing images so flamboyantly beautiful you almost laugh. Yet just when you think Broken Embraces will become a sensory feast and little else, Almodóvar gives you an image as intellectually evocative as it is visually lush. There are several to choose from, but the one that stuck with me most occurs when the blind Harry, facing a giant screen, learns that the image before him is of his beloved Lena. Unable to see it, he runs his hands over the grainy frozen image. Alberto Iglesias’ lush score surges as Harry’s fingers follow private paths of desire and longing over her face, so present yet just out of reach. Perfectly composed, quietly affecting, and thematically rich, it’s quintessential Almodóvar. It may be typical, but that doesn’t make it any less beautiful.

                                            Matt Connolly