Film Festival 09 - Broken Embraces
Broken Embraces
Los abrazos rotos, Spain 2009
Director: Pedro Almodóvar
Festivals: Cannes (In Competition) 2009
"Pedro Almodóvar has always managed to combine elegance and
exuberance, and his latest movie is no exception: a richly
enjoyable piece of work, slick and sleek, with a sensuous feel for
the cinematic surfaces of things and, as ever, self-reflexively
infatuated with the business of cinema itself& The action of
the movie unfolds in two periods: flashing back and forth between
the present day and 1994. It is a measure of Almodóvar's
absolute technical mastery, and that of his editor José
Salcedo, that this is never disconcerting or confusing.
Lluís Homar plays Mateo, a former film director who lost his
sight in a car crash& Now he writes screenplays under his pen
name 'Harry Caine'& A newspaper obituary of a shady financier,
Ernesto Martel, tremendously played by José Luis
Gómez, triggers memories of his movie-making career in the
90s: Martel bankrolled Mateo's final movie on condition that his
mistress was given the lead.
This of course is Lena, played by Penélope Cruz in a state
of almost hyperreal gorgeousness, a sublime beauty in whose
presence Almodóvar's camera goes into a kind of swooning
trance, and whose exquisiteness consists at least partly in its
fabricated quality& The film-within-a-film motif is
head-spinningly sophisticated, though the theme of cinema itself
within cinema (traditionally rather overrated by cinephiles in
terms of interest and importance) is kept fresh and alive through
Almodóvar's sheer energy& I defy anybody to watch it
without a tingle of pure moviegoing pleasure." - Peter Bradshaw,
The Guardian
