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Broken Embraces
Reuniting with Penélope Cruz, Pedro Almodóvar returns with noir tale
Penélope Cruz stars in Pedro Almodóvar’s Broken Embraces
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With a movie within a movie and many of his on-screen regulars, Spanish auteur Pedro Almodóvar’s Broken Embraces opens this month in New York. Lluis Homar plays Mateo Blanco, left blind and without the love of his life after an accident. Soon after he changes his name to Harry Caine, which had up until that point only been his writing pseudonym, in an attempt to kill his former self. Penélope Cruz, in her fourth film with Almodóvar, plays Mateo/Harry’s lost love, Lena.
Living life actively despite his blindness, Harry continues to write screenplays while he is assisted by friend and former colleague Judit (played by Blanco Portillo who was previously seen in Almodóvar’s Volver) and her son Diego. One night Diego inquired why Harry has left behind his former self behind and thus the story of Mateo/Harry, Lena, and their automobile accident is told.
Much like the 1964 Godard classic Contempt, Broken Embraces gives a nod to the world of film as we see the leads making a movie called Girls and Suitcases. The filming sequences act as the back story to Mateo and Lena’s initial falling in love. Girls and Suitcases, coincidentally, is purposefully reminiscent of Almodóvar’s earlier work Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdowneven being filmed in the same studio. Almodóvar has said this was not to pay homage to himself but simply to work with humorous material freely.
In this same vein of using other films to both inspire his work as well as appear in his work, there is a scene where the classic Roberto Rossllini film Viaggio in Italia is being watched on a television set. Almodóvar freely admits to using this particular device of setting up the theme of a scene by using a classic movie is one of his trademarks. Like the director’s earlier work, Bad Education, Broken Embraces is heavily influenced by the stylish film noir genre of American cinema which populated theaters in the 1940s and 50s. Penélope Cruz’s character is heavily influenced by the actresses of this era.
Mixing his usual themes of love, tragedy, family ties, and film history, Almodóvar’s Broken Embraces opens November 20.