NEW YORK (By
A. O. Scott, NYT)
November 21, 2009
― Can there be such a
thing as exuberant melancholy? I can’t
think of another way to describe the
spirit of “Broken Embraces,” Pedro
Almodóvar’s latest film, the title of
which carries a telling hint of paradox.
It is grave and effervescent, tender and
cruel.
The story might seem simple at first — a
film noir potboiler of jealousy and
revenge — but as it unfolds, the
narrative reveals an intricate and
enigmatic structure, full of twists and
reversals. The visual and aural textures
are lush and sensual, as we’ve come to
expect from Mr. Almodóvar, and yet the
rich colors and deep sonorities somehow
illuminate an unusually austere
emotional terrain.
Like “All About My Mother,” “Talk to
Her,” “Bad Education” and “Volver” — not
a bad decade’s work, by the way —
“Broken Embraces” leaves the viewer in a
contradictory state, a mixture of
devastation and euphoria, amusement and
dismay that deserves its own clinical
designation. Call it Almodóvaria, a
syndrome from which some of us are more
than happy to suffer.
Mr. Almodóvar’s characters tend to be
stricken with their own versions of the
malady — subject to strong and confused
longings, surprised by pain in their
pursuits of pleasure. When we first meet
him, Harry Caine (Lluís Homar), the
central male figure in “Broken
Embraces,” seems to have found a cure. A
writer and former film director, Harry
is blind as the result of a long-ago car
accident and skilled at using his
disability as a tool of seduction. He is
looked after by Judit (Blanca Portillo),
who used to be his production assistant,
and by her son, Diego (Tamar Novas), and
generally appears content to live in a
sunny present tense of casual sex,
steady work and easy friendship.
Mr. Almodóvar has a gift for happy
beginnings. But the law of narrative
(and the law of desire, to cite one of
his early titles) mandates trouble, and
Harry’s curious English pseudonym,
evoking both “The Third Man” and “The
Postman Always Rings Twice,” is a
premonition of lurking shadows. Harry’s
current life, it turns out, is an
edifice of willed forgetting and
strenuous denial. His past is a secret
he is trying to keep, above all from
himself. But circumstances conspire to
pry open the vault, and Harry is
compelled to tell the tragic story of
the man he used to be.
Reviewers are frequently cautioned
against ruining the end of a movie. In
the case of Mr. Almodóvar, whose plots
thicken and explode according to their
own peculiar logic, we risk spoiling the
middle, so I’ll try to be circumspect
when it comes to further summary.
At the same time, though, the tale
framed by Harry’s reminiscence is so
strange and beautiful, so perfectly
realized, that no exposition could
damage it. The word flashback hardly
does justice to the episode from Harry’s
old life — when he was a dashing,
sighted cinéaste named Mateo Blanco —
that lifts “Broken Embraces” into the
company of Mr. Almodóvar’s other recent
masterworks.
Back then, 14 years before the bright,
blinded present, Mateo, whose surname
connotes both innocence and blankness,
embarked on an ambitious film project —
a comedy called “Girls and Suitcases” —
and also on a headlong, perilous affair
with an actress. Her name was Lena, and
she was the mistress of an industrialist
named Ernesto Martel (José Luis Gómez),
who was the film’s main financial
backer. Let the past tense in that
sentence stand as an indication of how
it all ended. The fact that Lena is
played by Penélope Cruz may tell you
everything else you need to know.
Or maybe not. Ms. Cruz has become Mr.
Almodóvar’s link to the glorious
movie-star traditions of the past. In
“Volver” he made her an incarnation of
melodramatic maternity, evoking the
wounded resilience of Anna Magnani and
Joan Crawford without sacrificing her
natural comic verve. Here she adopts a
more haunted and haunting persona, that
of a woman trapped by circumstances and
by her own choices in a wrenching
professional and romantic dilemma.
But since Mr. Almodóvar’s sympathy
gravitates naturally toward women, Lena
is much more than a static image of
female suffering or an object of male
hunger. Shadows of past screen goddesses
may still flicker across her face and
form — Audrey Hepburn, Gloria Grahame,
Simone Signoret — but she seems at once
freer and more vulnerable than they
were.
Mr. Almodóvar’s engagement with the
great traditions of movie melodrama is
never merely nostalgic. In the phase of
his career that began in 1995 with “The
Flower of My Secret” he has drawn
particular inspiration from Hollywood
directors of the 1950s, including Alfred
Hitchcock, Douglas Sirk and Nicholas
Ray, all of whom used relatively new
techniques of color cinematography to
discover fresh and uncanny registers of
feeling. The unsettled intensity that
was Ray’s particular specialty — the
sense, so vivid in his best films, of
wild emotions obeying their own
dangerous logic — infuses the middle
section of “Broken Embraces,” much of
which takes place on the windswept
volcanic island of Lanzarote.
But the most direct and striking
dialogue the movie conducts with a
filmmaker from the past is with Pedro
Almodóvar himself. Aficionados will
recognize “Girls and Suitcases,” bits of
which turn up in “Broken Embraces,” most
powerfully at the end, as a replica of
“Women on the Verge of a Nervous
Breakdown,” Mr. Almodóvar’s marvelous
madcap comedy from 1988. Its appearance
is not vanity or clever self-quotation.
Rather, the director’s pastiche of his
early, funny work becomes, in the
context of this somber new film, a
poignant reflection on aging and loss.
To catch a glimpse of “Women” in the
mirror of “Embraces” is to see how
cinematic images can be both tangible
and ghostly.
And also — literally in the case of
Harry Caine and “Girls and Suitcases” —
invisible to their maker, who is no
longer the man he was. He has lost so
much over the years. Every one of us
has, and if Mr. Almodóvar has grown wise
enough to understand that art is a
dreadfully inadequate compensation, he
is still generous enough to offer it to
us anyway.
“Broken Embraces” is rated R (Under 17
requires accompanying parent or adult
guardian). It has sex, nudity and adult
sorrow.
BROKEN EMBRACES
Written and directed by Pedro Almodóvar;
director of photography, Rodrigo Prieto;
edited by José Salcedo; music by Alberto
Iglesias; art director, Antxon Gómez;
produced by Agustín Almodóvar and Esther
García; released by Sony Pictures
Classics. In Spanish, with English
subtitles. Running time: 2 hours 8
minutes.
WITH: Penélope Cruz (Lena), Lluís Homar
(Mateo/Harry Caine), Blanca Portillo (Judit),
José Luis Gómez (Ernesto Martel), Rubén
Ochandiano (Ray X) and Tamar Novas
(Diego).
