|
Broken Embraces review
:. Director: Pedro Almodóvar
:. Starring: Penélope Cruz, Blanca Portillo
:. Running Time: 2:09
:. Year: 2009
:. Country: USA
|
Cinema as a profession of faith. So one could speak of Broken Embraces. Pedro Almodovar, as an educated cinephile having assimilated his influences well, from Hitchcock to Eisenstein, while passing by Rossellini and himself, delivers a film noir of protean richness. It contains all of the ingredients of his style, which makes it an object not stripped of humor (in a great scene involving brainstorming, two screenwriters pitch the script for a vampire film that sounds hilarious and full of good ideas such as a female vampire using a muzzle to avoid biting her human lover), and places the film well beyond simple categorization. Almodovar doesn't innovate, doesn't reveal any true surprise, eather he satisfies himself with continuing in the field of experimentation started in his previous works, like Bad Education. Almodovar making Almodovar.
But his film is unfurled with such coherence and such control that one can only be inclined to greet the whole as solidly constructed. Clear and complex writing introduces the main characters, before dwelling on the stories of one character and then another before moving on to the main plot by offering the audience a progressively broader and then global view. In the end, he enforces his credo "A film should always be finished, even blindly." That's what Harry Caine, alias Mateo Blanco, will do. A director who, 14 years earlier, was blinded in a car accident in which he lost the love of his life. This woman, played by a sensitive Penelope Cruz at the top of her game, places herself in the middle of the destinies tied together in the film. Mistress of a rich financier, she falls in love with the director. The businessman, in a desperate move to keep her near him, produces the film, in which he charges his son with a "making of" documentary, not to offer a bonus extra in a future DVD release, but to keep an eye on the two lovebirds. Armed with footage, he hires an assistant to lip read. Ideas like this abound and are a direct tribute to the magic of cinema; in this case to silent film.
The film develops various themes specific to cinema and which serve the drama. Thus, the theme of doubles envisaged as a duplication, a repetition or an amplification is omnipresent throughout the story. The first shot of the film features stand-ins; the investor's son has the same first name, Ernesto; Mateo Blanca invents a pseudonym, a second me, in the persona of Harry Caine; Penelope Cruz plays Lena the mistress who plays a role in a comedy directed by her lover, not as a femme fatale from the mythical film noir of the 50's, but as a woman condemned to fate.
This film within a film is itself a kind of remake of Almodovar's Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, a remake in which the investor after having been abandoned go steal the reels to change the editing. A work sabotaged by revenge which 14 years later, Mateo will take on again. Because in this film, Almodovar places the montage in the middle of the drama, in which he builds the narration. His film enjoys an arrangement of scenes and shots where everything is precisely in its place. Images are strongly symbolic, like a large screen kiss that's pixilated and magnified. The image that follows summarizes the love that the Spanish director has for cinema. A love which he manages to have us share and to celebrate in these broken embraces. But curiously, the the way he puts it onscreen is shown so simply that it destroys any emotion.
One leaves this film conquered by control, but neither filled with wonder nor subjugated. On the contrary, nothing else remains of this declaration other than its aesthetic coldness.
Moland Fengkov
 Movie Reviews: 1998 - 2011
Movie Reviews: 2012 - present
|
|
