In Broken Embraces, his
latest meditation on how a love of movies can shape, enrich and at times
perhaps even redeem our lives, Spanish master Pedro Almodovar first shows us a
seemingly broken man, a blind man who begins this particular day by buying a
newspaper. Harry Caine – even his cinema charged name possesses an intriguing
back story – saddles up to a beautiful young woman in the street – who has just
popped out of a nearby “modeling” agency. Drinking in her odor, Harry persuades
the young woman to return to his flat on the pretext that she read to him from
the newspaper. The reading quickly dissolves into what for Harry is a delicious
romp, with clothes flying all over the apartment. No sooner does the couple
climax than they are interrupted by the appearance – it feels like an invasion
– of Harry’s agent, Judit (Blanca Portillo) who is visibly displeased by the
scene. As the young lady is exiting Judit reads Harry the riot act.
“You can’t bring to your house a
person who helps you across the street. One of these days something awful will
happen to you!”
“Everything that’s had to happen
to me has. Now, all that’s left is for me to enjoy life.”
The scene brilliantly encapsulates
Harry’s present predicament, suggests that Judit and her lovely adult gay son,
Diego (Tamar Novas), are his real family – the balance of the film is devoted
to explicating just how complicated and emotionally punishing those ties have
become – and that Harry is a sad ghost of an earlier self, a robust, talented
writer/director who used to call himself Mateo Blanco.
It’s amazing that I’ve been able to
get this far without mentioning the absolute core of Broken Embraces --
an astonishing, luminous performance by Penelope Cruz as Harry’s dead lover,
his cinema muse, a woman who’s tragic fate the film’s labyrinth,
self-referential structure is devoted to unraveling.
The one news story that Harry’s
gorgeous trick did convey is the death of an old enemy: Ernesto Martel Sr.
(Jose Luis Gomez). The news of the demise of this wealthy and corrupt land
developer obviously hits Harry and Judit very hard, but, as we will see, for
rather different reasons. One of the most affecting and daring narrative
devices that Almodovar invokes is to employ two younger gay men as the
instruments for revealing the whole horrible and deliciously fascinating back
story/flashback where Ernesto Sr. reeks his terrible revenge on Harry,
destroying both his woman and his art.
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As with his recent masterpieces – All
About My Mother, Volver and Bad Education, Almodovar conjures up
every trick in plotting and emotional manipulation he has gleaned from the
masters of Noir – Otto Preminger’s Fallen Angel is a particular
inspiration here – and from the ever present Hitchcock – Vertigo
and Psycho in this case – to keep us reeling with the absurdist
predicaments that dog these characters: a young woman sells herself to a rich
industrialist to save her dying father; a gay boy desperately tries to please
his abusive father by arranging to shadow his dad’s arch rival with a movie
camera (a camera whose tripod conjures image of the homicidal instrument from
Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom); another more comfortable with himself gay
man almost succumbs to an accidental drug overdose which sets him up to be an
audience for a horrible story his overprotective mother has been shielding him
from; and we get to experience close up why filmmakers should refrain from
mixing their libidos with their art.
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Cruz is magnificent – like Gael
Garcia Bernal in Bad Education, essentially playing three roles –
especially since she is never seen in the present tense framing story. Like the
best forties’ noir heroines, Cruz’ raw authenticity and believability allows us
to forgive her any transgression – in the process perhaps forgiving ourselves
our own sad, wanton, feckless early lives: the very foolish acts that led us to
the Church of Almodovar in the first place.
Tamar Novas as Diego – the latest
in a long line of Almodovar empathetic pretty boys – is a perfect stand-in for
our kinder, more generous impulses. A subtle visual gag has the blind Harry
accidentally bursting in on a naked Diego, one of Almodovar’s few indulgences
to his male identified gay fans.
Perhaps the only flaw in casting
comes with Lluis Homar’s challenging dual job to be both the wounded present
day Harry and the younger, ambitious and reckless Mateo. Homar served Almodovar
well in Bad Education as the doggedly imprudent “Fred MacMurray” to
Gael’s ruthless “Barbara Stanwyck” murderess, but here he seems a little too
male frumpy, too insubstantial a life force to be the cause of so much
complicated mayhem and regret.
Broken Embraces’ virtues are
hard to appreciate on a single viewing – one useful supplement is Almodovar’s
screenplay, available on www.ropeofsilicon.com.