Broken Embraces
I hope Pedro Almódovar wins a Golden Globe or an Oscar for Broken Embraces. Not because I loved the movie, but because I like his speeches. He is funny and never afraid to be political and I am always grateful for that combination. Everyone gets mad at Sean Penn when he gives a speech. This is understandable because he’s not very good at being funny in these moments. He’s usually smug and self-righteous, which is too bad because just because he’s tiresome doesn’t mean he’s always wrong. In any case, Pedro Almódovar can usually always be counted on to give a good, pointed speech, and so I hope he wins an award.
But as for Broken Embraces, I confess I was not very moved. I am sorry because I am a fan of Pedro Almódovar, and so this feels disloyal. But then, I am not that sorry. In his introduction to How to Go to the Movies, Quentin Crisp writes that “it is the continuous appreciation of a director’s work or an actress’s performances that is the deepest joy of moviegoing.” I have taken that as a directive for my own moviegoing and this blog, and there is plenty I appreciated about the film and although it didn’t bring me to rapture, it did nothing to lessen my admiration.
I should also confess that this write-up is full of spoilers about the film’s plot and if you haven’t seen it but are planning to, you should probably wait to read the rest of this.
The movie begins with a seduction between a beautiful blond woman and an older blind man. Before the seduction the woman reads some news about how a powerful businessman named Ernesto Martel has died. Then there is the seduction. Then the woman excuses herself to the bathroom and then while the man is zipping up his jeans another woman with short dark hair comes into the apartment and there’s an awkward exchange when the first woman comes out of the bathroom. She leaves right away. We have also learned that the blind man was a film director named Mateo but now goes by Harry Caine. The dark-haired woman is his agent. Then through a series of flashbacks and stories within stories and movies within movies we learn how he lost his sight. We don’t, however, see the blond woman again.
But we do get to see Penelope Cruz. It’s through all the flashbacks that we get to see her. We learn that she once wanted to be an actress but then she became a call girl. When we first see her she is a secretary to Ernesto Martel. Eventually she becomes Martel’s mistress; it’s not clear that she really loves him, since she became his lover only after Martel paid for her father to get cancer treatment at a very expensive hospital.
There are so many hospitals in Pedro Almódovar’s films. There are at least three medical emergencies in Broken Embraces. All About My Mother begins in a hospital. The son in the car accident. At least I think it begins with the hospital—I haven’t seen it since it first came out. My recollection of High Heels is also hazy but I remember a hospital at the end. The present-day setting for Talk to Her takes place mostly in a hospital. I was struck by this while watching Broken Embraces because I realized in Almódovar’s films the hospitals are so bright and clean. The doctors and nurses are competent and even though terrible things are happening in these places, I feel like the medical care is quite good, and this reassures me.
At some point Penelope Cruz goes to audition for the film director—back when he has his sight and his name is Mateo. He falls for her and casts her as the lead in a comedy called Girls and Suitcases, a film that bears a strong resemblance to Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown. Ernesto Martel is very suspicious of this development, but he goes along and, in fact, ends up financing the film. But because he is so suspicious Martel sends his gay son, who wears a really unfortunate wig, to be on the set with his camera under the guise of making a documentary, but really the son is there to spy for his father.
Every day Ernesto Martel watches the footage from the set. The sound quality is so bad that he hires a woman who reads lips to sit with him and transcribe and translate what everyone is saying. I loved these scenes with the lip reader. I loved the relationship between Martel and the woman reading lips. He is filled with jealousy and rage and she is simply taking notes, remaining impassive as she translates his mistress’s betrayal. The discrepancy between their levels of feeling is riveting.
After coming from a rendezvous with Mateo/Harry Penelope Cruz discovers the gay son is following her with his camera and realizes that Martel has been spying the whole time. She speaks straight to the camera, telling Martel she is leaving him, that she loves Mateo/Harry. She also accuses the son of being like the son in Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom.
While Martel watches this footage with the lip reader Penelope Cruz walks into the room and delivers the same lines that her projected self is saying on the screen. I liked this very much, but more than that I liked thinking about how this moment must be for the lip reader. It’s such a fascinating and awkward triangle. Almódovar makes so many sudden swerves in his storylines. We swerve to the past. We swerve to the present. From one character to another. I wished we could have swerved more to the lip reader.
I also loved the triangle of the director having an affair with the actress who is the mistress of the producer. I described that to Louchette and she said, “Almódovar is so good at making a snarl.”
The snarl gets even more snarled and the director and Penelope Cruz flee to Lanzarote, one of the Canary Islands. There is the most amazing volcanic landscape and I learned from this article in the Guardian that the Danish couple who rent the fleeing lovers a place to stay actually do rent bungalows on the island and I would love some day to go there.
There’s also a breakfast scene in the movie that I loved. At one point the agent and her son Diego have a meal. It is so beautiful and bright and clean. The orange juice is so orange. So much morning light through the glassware. I wanted to sit down to that breakfast.
And it’s fun to see Penelope Cruz do the Audrey Hepburn and Marilyn Monroe poses and all the other mirror shots. But they are nothing like when Marisa Paredes and Celia Roth look in the mirror in All About My Mother.
And I guess that’s the thing. With its story of lost love and betrayal, Broken Embraces seemed to aspire to a certain level of anguish. But, except for those scenes of Ernesto Martel watching the footage of Penelope Cruz while the lip reader translated for him, the film remained for me more of a light exercise in cinefandom. If it were Girls and Suitcases, the movie within the movie—manic, farcical, histrionic—the lightness probably would’ve been perfect.
I still think about that moment in Bad Education when Gael Garcia Bernal is in drag and he is confronting a priest about being molested years before and he suddenly breaks into tears, and then even more suddenly the camera pulls back, the director yells “cut” and “print,” the crew begins breaking down the set, and someone from the costume department starts disrobing Gael Garcia Bernal. The moment is over for everyone. Except for Gael Garcia Bernal, who is no longer a character weeping but an actor weeping. That was something I’d never seen captured on film before. It seemed to show something about cruelty and loneliness in filmmaking, but I’m still not completely sure if that’s what was so affecting about it.
I also wanted to mention the ad that runs before Broken Embraces. I saw the film at the Landmark Sunshine on Houston Street, a theater I really enjoy. It’s close to Prune and the seats are incredibly well raked. But this ad. It’s in black and white. It begins with a flickering neon sign that says “America.” The sign is half-submerged in water. It’s dark and not clear what has happened, but it seems like there’s been a disaster of some scale. Maybe a flood. A scratchy voiceover says fragments from a Walt Whitman poem. There are subtitles in scratchy lettering. There are fireworks. There are bare-chested men and children. There is rippling grass. There is a scrambling quality at times. Someone scales a cyclone-wire fence. A white woman and a black man kiss. People running. More fireworks. More running and people carrying a banner that says “Go Forth” and then the red Levi’s logo. This makes people in the theater laugh.
I’ve seen this at least twice now and each time that Levi’s logo appeared it got a laugh. I think the audience is laughing because what is presenting itself as a kind of film poem is not a film poem at all. It’s an ad.
This, though, is a film poem.
