Bro­ken Embraces

Pedro Almod­ó­var is a film­mak­er of two halves: cre­ator of bur­lesque, super-camp, riotous­ly broad-humoured farce (Women on the Verge of a Ner­vous Break­down), ver­sus the deeply sym­pa­thet­ic (melo)dramatist of styl­ish­ly dark emo­tion­al mys­ter­ies (Mata­dor and Bad Edu­ca­tion). Yet his films seem to res­onate most pow­er­ful­ly when he hits on the alchemic con­coc­tion of these two tones, as in Talk to Her and All About My Mother.

After watch­ing his lat­est, Bro­ken Embraces, it’s no sur­prise to hear it was orig­i­nal­ly inspired by a series of migraines Almod­ó­var had been suf­fer­ing. The prod­uct of a frac­tured, fevered filmic imag­i­na­tion it cer­tain­ly is. Fol­low­ing an excel­lent open­ing scene in which blind screen­writer Har­ry Caine (Lluís Homar) enjoys a mid-morn­ing tryst with an oblig­ing young stranger he picked up off the street, the view­er is danced across a net­work of fork­ing nar­ra­tive paths and spun through a kalei­do­scope of glit­ter­ing cin­e­mat­ic ref­er­ences (includ­ing more than a few glossy nods to the director’s own back catalogue).

In a premise recall­ing that of Bad Edu­ca­tion, Caine – a noirish pseu­do­nym adopt­ed after the mys­te­ri­ous acci­dent which left him blind and caused him to renounce his for­mer iden­ti­ty as film­mak­er Mateo Blan­co – is prompt­ed into Hitch­cock­ian reflec­tion on his per­son­al biog­ra­phy by a vis­it from the shifty-look­ing Ray X (Rubén Ochan­di­ano) (also, unsur­pris­ing­ly, not his real name; it’s all as ridicu­lous as it sounds), who wants to make a film with him about the recent­ly deceased busi­ness mogul, Ernesto Martel.

Caine’s flash­back takes us to Pené­lope Cruz, the jew­el in Bro­ken Embraces’ glo­ri­ous­ly opu­lent crown, who also oper­ates under mul­ti­ple monikers: by day as Lena, Martel’s hum­ble PA, strug­gling to pay for her elder­ly father’s spi­ralling med­ical bills; by night as Séver­ine, call-girl and aspir­ing actress.

Lat­er, after suc­cumb­ing to Martel’s infat­u­a­tion with her and mov­ing in with him, she achieves her ambi­tion (and gains a few more aspects), when Mateo casts her as the lead in his new movie, Girls & Suit­cas­es. A re-envi­sion­ing of Almodóvar’s own Women on the Verge of a Ner­vous Break­down, it offers wel­come cameos to some of his old­est stars, like Chus Lam­p­reave, and brings his – now text­book – film-with­in-a-film trope to new heights of self-consciousness.

Cruz’s cipher-like role sees her fast becom­ing Almodóvar’s faith­ful, glossy-coat­ed lap­dog, rather than respect­ed muse though; as here, his fix­a­tion shifts from the cleav­age and padded der­rière of Volver’s Sophia Loren homage, to Cruz’s chameleon vis­age. While mak­ing for exquis­ite reflec­tions of sil­ver screen stars from Audrey to Mar­i­lyn, this leaves Cruz lit­tle meat to grasp in her role, and the view­er at a loss as to where to pool their emo­tions despite the trag­ic twists of the mul­ti­ple nar­ra­tives (to reveal too much of which would spoil Almodóvar’s game).

Telling­ly, one of the most mov­ing – and visu­al­ly daz­zling – moments in the film is an image of an age­ing, blind film­mak­er fondling a giant dis­play of old, pixel­lat­ed black and white celluloid.

A paean to clas­sic cin­e­ma and film­mak­ing itself, Bro­ken Embraces will keep your aver­age cineaste and ardent Almod­ó­varite enter­tained play­ing spot-the-ref­er­ence. Yet some­how miss­ing both the brash vital­i­ty and emo­tion­al gen­eros­i­ty of his best work, it ulti­mate­ly begs a reassess­ment of Pauline Kael’s famous descrip­tion of Almod­ó­var as ​‘Godard with a human face’.

To his and his editor’s cred­it, it all holds togeth­er extreme­ly slick­ly, where it would have end­ed up a splat­tered mess on the floor in less expert hands. Part of the prob­lem is just how well it all hangs togeth­er, though. Like an elab­o­rate­ly woven cob­web, it’s a mar­vel but so full of holes that it’s all too eas­i­ly swept from memory.