Broken Embraces

(2009)

Directed by

Pedro Almodovar

Review by Zach Saltz

Posted - 7/11/10

The old man and the woman sit in the darkened theater, watching the behind-the-scenes footage of a film shoot projected on to the screen.  Nothing is heard except the woman in the audience, a lipreader reading the mouth of the woman onscreen and telling the man next to her what she is saying.  She says the woman onscreen doesn’t love the man anymore.  “Do you really think she means that?” He asks.  “How would I know, I only read lips,” the woman replies.

The man in question is Ernesto Martel, a powerful corporate magnate financing the film on the screen.  The woman in the film is Lena (Penelope Cruz), his mistress, an aspiring would-be actress who sleeps with Ernesto only as a way for him to continue to finance her film.  In turn, she has begun an affair with the film’s director, Matteo Blanco.  Martel, in a fit of overbearing jealously, employs his son to film Lena on the set to ensure her fidelity to him.  Ernesto’s desperation in his blindness of the affair leads to tragic consequences reverberating 15 years later.

Throughout Broken Embraces, director Pedro Almodóvar returns to the theme of pictures without words and sounds without images.  This is a film steeped in the senses, and how, when characters are deprived of them, they overcompensate in vapid acts of senselessness.  The flashback structure of the narrative, a hallmark of the director, grants the viewer a superhuman perspective on the events during the film shoot and those that ensue years later, with Matteo now a blind recluse who goes by the name Harry Cain.  Of course, Harry Cain’s name seems fitting, as he heads toward a tempestuous maelstrom of reinvigorated desire for both Lena and the film itself (Matteo Blanco, or “white weather,” may illustrate the dead calm before the storm’s destruction).

The revelations of the final twenty minutes are underwhelming.  It is as though Almodóvar has hit a home run with two outs in the bottom of the ninth, but still trails by ten runs.  The surprises are bloated and unnecessary, given how well the director has systematically coerced interest and concern from his audience.  Still, Broken Embraces is preposterously entertaining; there is undeniable pleasure in seeing Cruz evoke Anna Magnani in Volver and play Audrey Hepburn here, though Almodóvar’s assertion that making films subverts the problem of the beleaguered guilty subconscious owes more to Fellini than the rapturous face of his fairest lady.

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