Dive verdict: 4 of 5 stars
Pedro Almodóvar has a rare and beautiful touch with people. His movies don’t have antagonists or protagonists because in real life there are no such things. Instead, they have complicated humans deeply embedded in insolubly complex problems. He ties these characters up in one another’s lives and then ties them back down to themselves like no one else can. It’s his forte, and it makes him one of the world’s best living directors.
In “Broken Embraces,” his main human subject is a director like himself. Mateo Blanco (played touchingly by Almodóvar-collaborator Lluis Homar) is a successful, aging movie director cursed with blindness.
After two surprising coincidences intrude on his quiet life in Madrid, he is forced to reveal to a young friend a part of his life seldom discussed involving an affair with an actress on one of his sets a decade before. Recalling everything in narrative flashbacks, from the intrigues of the romance to the fatal car crash that robbed him of his sight, Mateo’s is a menacing noir story fit for the movies. Watching him tell it becomes a fruitful meditation on one of cinema’s favorite subjects (cinema itself), and shows the art of film-making as an everyday experience.
Almodóvar’s flawless interior sets are normally arresting in their colors, but he’s toned them down for “Broken Embraces” as if to keep them out of the way of his foray into noir techniques. He wrings extreme amounts of sexual and personal tension out of subtle shifts in foregrounds and backgrounds, and builds unexpected and pleasing suspense with things as simple as shoes pounding on hardwood floors.
But his painter’s palate is still there, and is as beautiful as its most beautiful shot: a single teardrop on a ripe tomato. You can call it fruity, because it technically is, but you can’t call it anything less than sexy, sweet cinema without betraying yourself as totally blind.
