NEW
YORK (By Mark Harris, NYT)
November 1, 2009
― Sitting in an East Side
hotel suite in early October, across
from the writer-director Pedro Almodóvar,
Penélope Cruz picked up a glossy,
oversized magazine and gazed admiringly
at the cover photograph of Uma Thurman.
“It’s good,” she said, turning the
picture toward Mr. Almodóvar, her eyes
seeking his endorsement.
He leaned toward it, enthusiastically
assessing Ms. Thurman’s pose and cropped
blond coiffure. “Yes, yes,” he said to
Ms. Cruz, accelerating from English into
Spanish as his mind started racing along
tracks of celluloid. “Actresses, when
they are close to 40, cut their hair. It
always makes them look younger. Remember
Sharon Stone? How she cut her hair when
she was about 40, 42? It was good!”
He seemed, for a moment, transfixed by
the cover, as Ms. Thurman’s image
entered his mind, to be collated and
cross-indexed with thousands of other
mental snapshots of actresses. “It’s
true,” he said, laughing. “I really am
fascinated by actresses, by everything
they do, even by the dressing room,
which is the sanctum sanctorum of any
actress. And I am especially fascinated
by actresses who play actresses.”
Which is precisely what Ms. Cruz does in
“Broken Embraces,” Mr. Almodóvar’s
fourth collaboration with her — and, she
said, her most difficult. In the movie,
which closed this fall’s New York Film
Festival and opens in theaters on Nov.
20, she plays Lena, a rich man’s kept
woman, who has the chance to fulfill,
however briefly, her long-deferred dream
of being a movie star when she becomes
romantically involved with a director (Lluís
Homar). Lena, a heartbreaking figure
whose own identity is so unformed she is
only too eager to become someone else
(early in the movie, she is costumed and
styled as Audrey Hepburn), is “maybe the
saddest character I ever wrote,” Mr.
Almodóvar said. “She has a past she
doesn’t like at all, so when she finds
she can impersonate someone, it’s like
having a new life. She is hard — a
fallen angel. And that is the biggest
challenge I have given Penélope so far.”
Mr. Almodóvar’s films with Ms. Cruz have
often found the sweet spot where the
ornate trappings of melodrama eventually
fall away to reveal deeper and more
complicated emotions and motives.
They’ve also offered Ms. Cruz some of
her richest opportunities. In the 1997
thriller “Live Flesh,” she dominates the
first 10 minutes, playing an
impoverished prostitute in 1970 Madrid
who gives birth on a city bus. Two years
later, when he was casting “All About My
Mother,” which would win the Oscar for
best foreign-language film, Mr.
Almodóvar called upon her again, this
time to play a nun. Even as she falls
into an affair with a transvestite and
becomes H.I.V.-positive, she remains the
film’s sweetest, purest presence. “It
surprised me when he told me what the
role was,” she recalled. “But I thought,
‘Only Pedro could make this real,
because he has no judgment against any
of these characters.’ ”
And in the 2006 drama “Volver,” Ms. Cruz
earned her first Academy Award
nomination for playing a determined
widow who was an amalgam of women from
Mr. Almodóvar’s childhood in La Mancha,
albeit with a little Sophia Loren thrown
in to place her within the fabric of
movie history that is woven through all
of his work.
“Someone asked me, ‘Is she a muse for
you?,’ ” said Mr. Almodóvar, whose
long-term collaborations with actresses,
beginning with Carmen Maura through the
1980s, have been famously fruitful and
sometimes just as famously volatile.
“Well, yes. She is a muse for me in the
sense that a muse is someone who makes
you better than you are. I think I am a
better director with her, because she
believes that I am better than I am, and
that blind faith gives me a lot of
strength.”
“No, no,” replied Ms. Cruz, shaking her
head and smiling calmly. “I know exactly
how good you are.”
The chemistry Mr. Almodóvar, 60, and Ms.
Cruz, 35, share would almost seem
romantic if he were not one of the
world’s best-known openly gay directors
and she were not linked in the tabloids
to the actor Javier Bardem. (Asked if a
wedding is in the works, she said, with
a pleasant smile and eyes of cold steel:
“You are a writer for The New York
Times, yes? I think maybe you are not
supposed to ask that kind of question.”)
Their easy, affectionate rapport has
developed over half of Ms. Cruz’s life —
she was 17 the first time she met the
director, who rejected her for the role
of a 35-year-old woman in his 1993
comedy “Kika” but told her he’d call her
in a few years.
Over their first three films, she rode
the emotional waves of each new role —
“In Pedro’s movies I am always either
dying or having babies,” she said — and
their kinship developed. When she won
her supporting-actress Oscar last year
for Woody Allen’s “Vicky Cristina
Barcelona,” she thanked Mr. Almodóvar
effusively. And while she wants to try
directing eventually — “Maybe in 10
years,” she suggested; “Earlier, I
think,” he answered — she said she would
do so only with his blessing. “You have
it!” he told her.
If “Broken Embraces” didn’t strain their
bond, it was still taxing. “This was the
movie where I cried the most between
takes,” Ms. Cruz said. “This character’s
energy and her way of expressing herself
is so different from mine. I’m much more
like the character I played in ‘Volver.’
She was solid, strong, like women I grew
up with. But for this character, Pedro
always wanted whatever I was feeling
just before or just after the tears came
— those are the moments when I found
her.”
Mr. Almodóvar took pleasure even on the
hardest days of shooting. “All the
difficulties actresses have at the
moment they are acting really interest
me,” he said. “At that time, the
director is like the husband, the lover,
the friend, the mother, the father, the
psychiatrist. But there’s also a point
when the director has to be terribly
cruel, because actresses sometimes have
to face their own demons. And then, the
director has to be the executioner.
Executioner — is that the right word?”
He looked over at Ms. Cruz for
confirmation as she grinned. “I don’t
know why I’m saying this in front of
Penélope! Because that’s not our case.”
“That’s right!” she said. “My tears were
because of the frustrations of this
woman I was playing, not because of
him.”
If almost all of Mr. Almodóvar’s works
are, on a subtextual level, movies about
movies, “Broken Embraces” ups the ante
by explicitly taking the film business
as its subject. Ms. Cruz’s character
provides the heart and pathos, but the
narrative’s drive resides in the story
of a director fighting grief, depression
and physical infirmity to finish a film
that has remained uncompleted for 15
years — a comedy struggling to emerge
from a tragedy. “I was not conscious of
it at the beginning, but in the end I
realized that this is my love letter to
cinema,” Mr. Almodóvar said.
For a love letter, it’s remarkably sad.
In fact, the glimpses we get of the film
within the film, a brightly colored romp
called “Chicas y Maletas” (“Girls and
Suitcases”) that is intended to evoke
the director’s 1988 international
breakthrough, “Women on the Verge of a
Nervous Breakdown,” only serve as a
startling reminder of how much more
melancholy his movies have become. “This
is certainly the most austere film I’ve
ever shot,” he said. “And it perhaps
disappoints people who expect from me a
more flamboyant kind of filmmaking. It
is true, I think, that my films are
sadder now, and yet one thing this film
is saying is that life is not perfect,
but cinema can make it a little less
imperfect.”
When The New York Times Magazine
interviewed Mr. Almodóvar 10 years ago,
the writer noted that “seeming younger
than his actual age is clearly something
that he works at: he sometimes dresses
like a teenager” and dyes his hair
brown. Today, Mr. Almodóvar’s hair is
gray (though impressively full) and his
clothes restrained. Yes, he has a few
creases, but boredom, weariness and
resignation do not yet seem to have
found a place to settle on his face.
Nor is the sorrowful quality of his
recent work reflected in his exuberant
demeanor. He insists that there’s
optimism even in “Broken Embraces,” and
while making the movie, he enjoyed
revisiting “Women on the Verge” so much
that he shot some extra scenes to round
out “Chicas y Maletas” (“something very
dirty and outrageous, like the early
’80s movies I made,” he said) to be
available as a DVD extra. He is also
consulting on a musical stage version of
“Women on the Verge,” to be directed by
Bartlett Sher (a 2008 Tony winner for
“South Pacific”) and written by David
Yazbek (“The Full Monty” on Broadway)
and Jeffrey Lane. A 2007 nonmusical
stage adaptation of “All About My
Mother,” in which Diana Rigg starred in
London, may make its way to New York as
well.
Eventually, Mr. Almodóvar will start
working on a new script; he usually
writes 8 or 10 drafts and begins to
settle on actresses around the third. He
has been directing films at a rate of
one every two or three years and is so
far sticking to a vow that his onscreen
alter ego makes in “Broken Embraces”: no
sequels, remakes or biopics.
That last category is a tempting one,
especially when Mr. Almodóvar expounds
on the life of Ernest Hemingway’s
transsexual son, Gregory (later Gloria).
Bullfighting! Gender-bending! Think of
the costumes! Isn’t he at least
intrigued? “No biopics,” he said firmly.
“No biopics, no prequels, no sequels, no
hero movies, no antihero movies, and
definitely no superhero movies. Anything
else I can handle.”
