“Films have to be finished,” intones Mateo, the blind-former-filmmaker. “Even if you do it blindly.”
Thus does
himself from not quite being at his best with his 17th film. The
Spanish filmmaker famed for personal, lurid and over-the-top comedies
and dramas settles for straight, dull melodrama this time out. “Broken
Embraces” is as starved of wit and pathos as the film it references,
“Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown,” overflowed with those
virtues.
Mateo (
movie maker. He’s been writing scripts as “Harry Caine” for years, ever
since he lost his sight. “I became my pseudonym,” he narrates, bouncing
ideas off Diego, the son (
A newspaper obituary and a visit from a would-be
collaborator stirs memories of when Harry was Mateo, in love with the
aspiring actress Lena (
by cheating on her rich, powerful and much older lover to make a film
comedy with Mateo, and make love to him as she did.
The story bounces from the present, where
Harry/Mateo copes with his lack of sight and pieces together what
happened way back when, and 1994, when Mateo put Lena in his movie and
when the rich man’s son followed her on the set, with a camera, spying
on her for the old man.
One great touch — the footage the kid shoots is silent, so wealthy Ernesto (
hires a lip-reader to interpret what Lena and Mateo are whispering. The
obsessed old man watches Lena slip away while an interpreter
translates. Ernesto doesn’t take this lying down, and that’s where the
movie spirals into predictable melodrama.
The movie is production-designed to death and the sex scenes, another Almodovar specialty, are novel and arresting.
Mateo works extra hard to give Lena her big break.
But one failing in the film is how boring it is to watch Cruz pretend
to be a bad actress. The comic movie within a movie, which borrows from
“Women on the Verge,” isn’t funny.
Contrived incidents take over the picture long
before Mateo, at the editing table, declares that a film has to be
finished. In this case, it didn’t.
Broken Embraces
2 stars (out of 4)
Cast:
Director:
Running time: 2 hours 8 minutes
Industry rating: R for sexual content, language and some drug material
Roger Moore writes for the Orlando Sentinel. Via McClatchy-Tribune News Service.
