Pedro Almodovar has complete confidence in his go-to girl Penelope Cruz who’s absolutely radiant and captivating in BROKEN EMBRACES, a drama of love, jealousy, rage, that digs up the past as part of the healing process. The story is… mysterious and full of secrets. Cruz lights up every scene that she’s in.
A man writes, lives and loves in darkness. Fourteen years before, he was in a brutal car crash on the island of Lanzarote. In the accident, he not only lost his sight, he also lost Lena, the love of his life.
This man uses two names: Harry Caine, a playful pseudonym with which he signs his literary works, stories and scripts, and Mateo Blanco, his real name, with which he lives and signs the film he directs. After the accident, Mateo Blanco reduces himself to his pseudonym, Harry Caine. If he can’t direct films he can only survive with the idea that Mateo Blanco died on Lanzarote with his beloved Lena.
In the present day, Harry Caine lives thanks to the scripts he writes and to the help he gets from his faithful former production manager, Judit García, and from Diego, her son, his secretary, typist and guide.
Since he decided to live and tell stories, Harry is an active, attractive blind man who has developed all his other senses in order to enjoy life, on a basis of irony and self-induced amnesia. He has erased from his biography any trace of his first identity, Mateo Blanco.
BROKEN EMBRACES is about telling the story, it’s about letting it all out in the open, about allowing time to finally make us ready to return to our fondest memories as well as the painful ones. Half of the plot is set in the past where the filmmaker is looking back on the girl he once loved so dearly, how she got started from poor to riches due to the help of a very powerful influential man. The stereotype of directors sleeping with their actors is brought up in this well-structured plot. The blind screenwriter/filmmaker is charming, good with words; he could still conquer women even as a blind man.
Cruz’s ability to give appropriate reaction to a situation at hand in a timely manner is what makes her performance riveting. At times, it’s as though she could be quite animated because whether it’s suspicion, regret or fear and tears, Cruz gets all the emotion down pat and it’s not difficult for the audience to clearly see the different ordeals that she’s going through. If you’ve seen Volver , Talk To Her, or Almodovar’s previous work, then you’re familiar with his directing style. In this case, he relies on the element of surprise, catching the characters off guard, pealing the layer one by one, letting the past explains itself slowly but surely until a peaceful closure can be achieved.
One woman can cause so much trouble. She plants distrust in her rich husband, she goes into affair with the filmmaker, the rich husband’s son wishes he could receive the same affection that she’s getting, and there’s that bitterness that the filmmaker’s agent feels because there’s a certain connection between her and the filmmaker. BROKEN EMBRACES may feel like a glorified telenovela but Cruz’s acting and the cinematography make this drama worth watching in the theaters. But the story would be sweeter it ended on the shot of the filmmakers’ running his fingers across the TV screen, the moments after that seems like an unnecessary extension.
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