Broken Embraces

Ah. Right, this scuppers things a little. I've been writing a few posts about the best things of the decade, and firmly intended to put Almodovar on it. I was already thinking about how my post would read: I was going to write about the way Almodovar has discovered a mature, stately sort of style since All About My Mother - and how he has become a master of narrative, talking about the secrets and deceptions between people in a roundabout and thrilling way, by marrying auteur cinema with genre.

But the thing is, I've just seen Broken Embraces, which is largely speaking a failure - and it puts a different countenance on the rest of his career, I'm afraid. It highlights the weaknesses of Volver, and seems to show that Almodovar is running out of things to say: it's all well and good to play around and indulge your cinematic whimsy - but after a while, you're running on empty. Volver at least had an emotional core, and a character you care about: Penelope Cruz is completely magnetic in that film, and you're able to invest in her emotionally. But its sillinesses - its ludicrous plot twists and its melodrama - still showed up through the lovely pictures. Broken Embraces takes these weaknesses and builds on them, creating a whole set of emotionally flat characters and submitting them to a wilfully abstruse and absurd plot. Meanwhile, Almodovar's style seems to be verging on the seriously hokey, and there is nothing of the devil-may-care cojones of his earlier films to rescue it.

I'm largely disappointed because with Talk To Her and Bad Education, earlier this decade, he had made two of my favourite films of his - and ones which brilliantly married his gleeful tone and stylistic mastery to difficult, unsavoury topics. I'm thinking here of the hilarious silent film pastiche in Talk To Her, and the way Bad Education re-genders film noir, with Gael Garcia Bernal as the queer femme fatale at its centre. These films dealt with murder and paedophilia - yet in his insouciant, genre-bending way Almodovar managed to pull it off, while keeping these subjects suitably disturbing. And in both these films, his sensuality was beautiful to behold.

Talking of sensuality, I don't think Broken Embraces has any. Penelope Cruz looks beautiful as all hell, and is filmed with a lot of admiration, but somehow it is a totally unsexy performance in a completely sterile film. Almodovar surrounds her with awful, charisma-free men, and essentially makes her fanny about in various costumes. There is no sensuality, merely some decently filmed sex, some badly filmed sex, and some blunt, unfunny talk of sex. Cruz can never make us empathise with her because she is given so little back story and her motives and mentality are at all times so obscure. At the same time, Almodovar's excesses are wearying because they are tied up in a flimsy, dumb plot.

That plot, in brief: a film director, Harry Caine (thanks for the James M. Cain reference, Pedro; sledgehammer much), is looking back on the events that led to his becoming blind, fifteen years ago. A woman that he was having an affair with was tied up with a rich magnate, and - er - she died, and the film they were making together got tampered with by the magnate as an act of revenge. Meanwhile, in the present day, his agent's son is revealed to be his son, and his agent confesses that she betrayed Harry's lover to the rich magnate. Oh god, it's all so half-baked and ludicrous, with stale, hammy performances from almost everyone, and some really bad writing. The whole film could have done with an assiduous editor taking a sharp pair of scissors to it - to remove the bad pastiches, the superficial backstory, the bad jokes, perverse homophobia (!) and crucially the cumbersome detail - people opening doors slowly, waiters serving people slowly before conversation starts, and jigsaw-puzzle flashbacks hammering home what we'd already gathered was the plot's big secret, because we're not morons.

The great irony of this film is that it seems to be a plea by Almodovar for artistic freedom - Harry Caine was prevented from making his great film, and at the end of the film looks as if he will re-edit it to its former brilliance - but Caine's film looks terrible, and so does Almodovar's.


Listening to: Dungen, Ta det lugnt