Broken Embraces

City Paper Grade: A-

by Shaun Brady

CRUZIN': Pedro Almodóvar's Broken Embraces centers on the radiant Penélope Cruz. (CLICK IMAGE FOR LARGER VERSION)

[ City Paper Grade: A- ]

It's a single shot, but it's quintessential Almodóvar: a tear, better yet a woman's tear, even better yet Penélope Cruz's tear, falling onto a tomato in vivid close-up. Sensual, absurdly melodramatic, achingly funny, overripe (in form and in content) — it's one of those moments in which the Spanish auteur absolutely envelops an audience.

That it occurs, in this case, in a film within a film doesn't subtract from its impact. On the contrary, Pedro Almodóvar's latest labyrinth winds through a spiral of cinematic memories, not to pay homage but to illustrate the primacy of film in the emotional lives of those who worship it. It's easy to rattle off the films and filmmakers to which Broken Embraces makes explicit reference: Vertigo — for both Hitchcock and composer Bernard Herrmann, Peeping Tom, Belle de Jour, Douglas Sirk, Audrey Hepburn — but harder to explain why these obvious echoes resonate so deeply within Almodóvar's hothouse thriller.

Their richness becomes especially evident when watching the film that Mateo Blanco (Lluís Homar), the director at the heart of Broken Embraces, is making — Girls and Suitcases re-creates the candy-colored palette of Almodóvar's own Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown. This is no self-referential in-joke; by the film's end, from the ashes of all the lusts, betrayals and tragedies (most centered, naturally, on the radiant Cruz), it is this gaudy comedy that holds the key to salvaging the characters' broken lives. And it is the sight of hands tracing a pixillated image, even more than that lush tomato, that encapsulates the blend of eroticism and melancholy that Almodóvar can fuse.