Director: Pedro Almodóvar

Screenplay: Pedro Almodóvar

Running-time: 2 hrs 7 mins

Genre: Drama/Noir



CRITIQUE:


There isn’t quite a name like Pedro Almodóvar in Spanish cinema. With an exceptional oeuvre encrusted with widely-acclaimed, high-class gems such as Bad Education, All About My Mother and Women on the Verge of Breakdown, perhaps it’s hard to bring up a name as formidable and as culturally and aesthetically important as Almodóvar. His every latest release is watched with anticipation by loyalist fans and trepidation by his detractors, and usually ends up as a critical darling. Such as his recent cinematic effort Broken Embraces, which is so deeply entrenched in the annals of narrative cinema that it’s very likely to be lapped up by cinéphiles anywhere around the world. He dazzlingly and daringly blends noir, romance, melodrama, thriller, farce and homage to the medium itself that anyone with a deep love for film could hardly be won over.


In Almodóvar fashion, reminiscent to his earlier works Bad Education and Laws of Desire, Broken Embraces sets up a multi-layered narrative that swerves from two timelines, with Lluis Homar’s blind director revisiting his past forbidden fling with a beautiful call-girl-cum-actress-wannabe Lena (a scintillating, effervescent Penélope Cruz), who is in turn married to an old, decaying millionaire Ernesto Martel. This is the central conflict, with lust, betrayal, espionage and dangerous passions become the thematic undercurrents of this tale. And for those well-informed in cinema, these are the basic rudiments of the noir genre, to which Almodóvar’s film spectacularly pays reverence to, from dark classic Double Indemnity to even the earlier Hitchcock celluloid. From Cruz’s faithless wife to Homar’s director with a split personality Mateo Blanco/Harry Caine, these character and plot techniques refer back to the genre it assumes to embody. Which leads us to the core of the film. Whilst we undoubtedly admire Almodóvar’s aesthetic brilliance, he seems to wrap himself up with innumerable entanglements here that whence we get through the knotty tangle and arrive at the film’s conclusion, there’s a sense of disenchantment. For a film that builds so much on intrigue, slowly absorbing us into its depths, Almodóvar, then, ultimately lets us go with barely an emotional payoff. For we are left with a film about filmmaking, and we do not feel the central protagonist’s assemblage of work but rather Almodóvar hi-jinks.



VERDICT:

Pedro Almodóvar’s love-letter to noir cinema is passionate, ravishing and impeccably shot. Yet we are left dazed rather than overwhelmed, feeling as though Almodóvar owes us a much better pay-off and denouement. What starts off as gorgeously intriguing ends up as a self-indulgent and pompous.



RATING: B