This embrace looks a bit broken to me

Cast: Penélope Cruz, Lluis Homar, Jose Luis Gomez, Blanca Portillo
Director: Pedro Almodóvar
Screenwriter: Pedro Almodóvar

Pedro Almodóvar, arguably the defining Spanish director of his generation, provides yet another smart, lushly-staged and ingenious entry into his canon with Broken Embraces, again indulging his touches for self-reflexivity and sensual storytelling. Yet for all its beauty and attempts to show concern for the emotion within its characters, this feels an oddly hollow experience, most starkly when compared to the likes of Volver or Talk to Her in his oeuvre.

Broken Embraces divides its story over two time periods, one in the present day with a blind screenwriter called Mateo (Homar), working under his pen name of Harry Caine, and the other following his directing career in the past with a film bankrolled by financier Ernesto Martel (Luis Gomez) and starring the latter’s mistress, Lena (Cruz). The past story follows the making of Mateo’s film – which bears a striking resemblance to Almodóvar’s Woman on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown – and the plotting of Martel to have his son film Lena on the set in order for his father to later spy on the goings on. Through this he learns of the affair between Mateo and Lena and, in some truly excellent scenes, watches the silent footage back with a lip-reader voicing Mateo and Lena’s conversations.

Almodóvar’s technical filmmaking, in cohesion with editor Jose Salcedo and cinematographer Rodrigo Prieto, is superlative. His camera, as it has done in other films of his, makes muse Penélope Cruz near-abnormally beautiful. This time her beauty though is designed to reflect the the unreal nature of people on screen, another part of the widespread self-reflexivity of the film. The most apt and telling scene comes during a photo session ahead of shooting the film-within-the-film when Mateo places a Marilyn Monroe wig on Cruz, telling her to stop smiling because “the wig is false enough�.

The conceit for the film to acknowledge its status in the medium both provides a degree of intrigue for cinema fans and simultaneously wrenches most emotion from the story. The love affair between Mateo and Lena seems to have an air of inevitability to it, a lack of passion and more a sense of narrative duty. There is a feeling throughout of Almodóvar attempting to include any and all ideas generated for the film, as though he is going through the motions. Disappointingly for a filmmaker normally so in touch with the simple emotion of his stories, Broken Embraces feels overly cerebral and pretty vacuous, as if Almodóvar himself was more enamored with the film-within-a-film idea and not locating the poignancy of the tale.

If the film is hollow, it’s never the fault of the actors. Cruz is, as always under the direction of Almodóvar, utterly beguiling. Her character is weaker than her performance, making choices which indicate the desire of Almodóvar to place her within a context of Douglas Sirk of Alfred Hitchcock melodramatic noir femme fatales. But Cruz has an ability at her best to make the audience believe those choices, giving her an authenticity which seems entirely out of place with the character itself and her journey in the film. Homar is good enough at Mateo/Harry but is blown off the screen by Gomez as Martel. His performance, one of seething jealousy, puppy dog affection and ruthless conviction, is startlingly good. The problem is that this means the most compelling dramatic tension occurs in his story when the focus is supposed to be on the love affair of Mateo and Lena. It’s another key problem which the film cannot surpass through sheer bravura technical filmmaking.

Indeed, you cannot deny the quality of Almodóvar’s hand as a technical master. The problem is that while there are great scenes and moments in which his skill evokes a simple joy of watching a master at work – most notably the aforementioned narration by the lip-reader but also any scene where you witness his camera’s encompassing love for Cruz – but that makes only for great scenes, not a great film. Everything hangs together satisfactorily, but the whole is no match for the individual parts.

Broken Embraces is engaging and interesting on the level of watching a master at work. But, like Bad Education before it, Almodovar seems more concerned with the components, with the pieces all being in place. This results in a failure to locate the emotional core of his story and, as such, the film is admirable, beautiful and vacant.

Broken Embraces is out on 28th August via Pathe

By Sam Unsted