Films about filmmaking are almost invariably deeply personal works for their director. Fellini’s 8 ½, Truffaut’s Day For Night: both movies contain the creative essence and the artistic insecurities of the filmmaker laid bare with a candour that is not always present in their other work. But the same is not true of Pedro Almodovar’s Broken Embraces, a polished, handsomely-mounted picture which nevertheless leaves you with a sense of deflated emptiness.
Certainly, it is unmistakably an Almodovar film. Nobody else does richly-textured melodrama quite like him; nobody else can encourage such overwrought performances without unbalancing the film; nobody else shoots Penelope Cruz with a reverence which borders on fan-worship. But what’s missing here is the warmth and emotional honesty that infuses Almodovar’s most successful features. What’s missing is, arguably, Almodovar himself.
The logical place to look for Almodovar’s alter ego would be the filmmaker in the movie, a man who we know by two names. In the present day, he goes by the pseudonym Harry Caine – he’s a writer who lost his sight, his previous career and his identity along with it. But when we meet him in flashbacks, he is Mateo Blanco, film director. This dual identity is a slightly contrived dramatic device, and it’s one of the reasons that actor Lluis Homar fails to bring the character to life.
Blindness represents a profound horror for a film director – it takes a brave one to tackle it head on. Derek Jarman, dying of AIDS and losing his own sight, did it, obliquely, with Blue; Woody Allen pokes fun at the fear in Hollywood Ending. But Almodovar keeps the character at arms length – there is no sense that Caine/Blanco is his onscreen representative. In fact, it’s tempting to speculate whether Almodovar identifies more with Penelope Cruz’s character than with Homar’s. Certainly, when she is in front of the camera, the film exerts a fascination that rapidly dissipates once she is gone.
Cruz plays Lena, the femme fatale character in this neo-noir. An aspiring actress with a rich and jealously protective older lover, she is cast as the lead in Blanco’s latest film, Girls And Suitcases (an homage to Almodovar’s own Women On The Verge Of A Nervous Breakdown). Lena and Mateo fall in love, with disastrous consequences for the film, since her jealous lover is serving as its producer. Lena and Mateo’s story, set in 1994, plays out in a series of flashbacks while, in the present day, Caine/Blanco recounts the story. The downside of that technique is that there are some cumbersome chunks of exposition (recounted with machine gun pacing by Blanca Portillo) towards the end.
The layered structure of the story is echoed effectively by the use of reflections and images within images in the film. There is, it has to be said, no shortage of ideas here, and cineastes will have fun spotting all the movie references. Still, ultimately a fundamental problem stems from just that: the film feels like a mixed bag of smart ideas and nods to other pictures, rather than a coherent, distinct work of art.
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