Penelope Hepburn?
BROKEN EMBRACES
Directed by Pedro Almodóvar
2009, 127 mins., R (nudity, drug usage)
El Deseo S.A.
In Spanish with English subtitles
* * ½
Spanish director Pedro Almodóvar is one of the most important and challenging directors of the past forty years. As such, he has made several certifiable masterpieces, including: Woman on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown (1988), High Heels (1991), Talk to Her (2002), and Volver (2006). He’s also made several films with interesting ideas that misfired such as: Matador (1986), Kika (1994), All About My Mother (1999), and Bad Education (2004), the last of which was so bad I almost swore off Almodóvar films. With Broken Embraces, however, Almodóvar gives us something he’s never done before: a film that’s totally ordinary, clichéd, and predictable. It’s neither good nor bad, merely inconsequential. It’s (perhaps) worth seeing if you’ve nothing better to do, but it certainly won’t make you think of Almodóvar as an auteur.
By Almodóvar standards, Broken Embraces has a straightforward narrative. We are introduced to a former filmmaker, Mateo Blanco, who is now a blind writer calling himself Harry Caine (Lluis Homar). He is doted upon by his moonstruck agent, Judit (Blanca Portillo), and her young adult son, Diego (Tamar Novar). When Caine demands that Ray X, a burgeoning director, leave his apartment after sharing his script idea, we begin to learn how Blanco became Caine. From this point on we move back and forth between the present and 1992, where we meet Lena (Penélope Cruz), a former prostitute trying to go straight who is forced by her father’s staggering medical bills to become the mistress of her elderly employer, the wealthy industrialist, Ernesto Martel (José Luis Gómez). When Lena decides she wants to be an actress and auditions for Blanco, a classic triad develops. Martel establishes himself as the film’s producer, sends his son to the set to videotape everything he sees, and hires a lip reader to decipher conversations between Lena and Blanco. You can probably write the rest of the script from this. We see everything developing from a mile away, including the affair between Blanco and Lena, the relationship between Blanco and Judit, and the identities of both Diego and Ray X. The only real mysteries are how Mateo/Harry became blind and the whereabouts of Lena, and you could probably come up with explanations that are at least as plausible as what Almodóvar gives us.
There is some very nice camera work, including a few stunning aerial shots of a lonely costal highway, but it’s not in the service of much. The actors do a credible job throughout and Cruz has the toughest job. She has to play a marginally competent comedic actress in a star-crossed production. She’s dressed and coiffed to look like Audrey Hepburn and the film-within-a-film has the time warp quality of a 1950s French farce rather than the 1990s. Cruz is fine in this role, and she’s certainly delectable enough to be believable as the mistress of two powerful men, but it’s just not all that interesting watching Cruz being semi-competent. Woman caught between two powerful men, jealousy, revenge, a film-within-a-film, who sired whom…. all of this is very conventional stuff. Almodóvar doesn’t do a bad job with any of it, but it’s no better than what a novice would do. Who goes to an Almodóvar film to see the pedestrian?
In one of the film’s subplots, Martel exacts revenge while Mateo and Lena are off on a tryst. As producer, Martel rushes Mateo’s film into release by assembling the worst cuts of each scene, a ploy Mateo and Lena discover from a newspaper review deriding the film as a disaster. As Broken Embraces closes, Mateo is busy reassembling that film from recently surfaced footage. No surprise—the bad comedy is in the process of becoming a funny one. It’s hard not to see this is a metaphor for Broken Embraces. Surely a much sharper film must reside in Almodóvar’s vault.
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