The Details

Broken Embraces

Penelope Cruz, Lluis Homar, Jose Luis Gomez

Directed by Pedro Almodovar

Rated R

Beyond the Weekly

IMDb: Broken Embraces

Rotten Tomatoes: Broken Embraces

Broken Embraces, Pedro Almodovar’s 17th feature, finds Spain’s most celebrated filmmaker on candy-colored autopilot, shuffling various elements from his previous films around with such studied dispassion that I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that he made this latest one to fulfill a contractual obligation. Part of the problem may be that this is yet another tiresomely reflexive film about filmmaking, moving back and forth between present-day Madrid, where a blind writer-director (Lluis Homar) wrestles with footage of a movie he shot back in the early ’90s (which bears an unmistakable winky-poo resemblance to Almodovar’s own Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown), and lengthy flashbacks to the shoot itself, during which the not-yet-blinded filmmaker embarks upon an affair with his leading lady (Cruz), to the consternation of the love-struck mogul (Gomez) who shoehorned her into the movie in the first place.

Further complications ensue, and there are ripe secrets lurking within the ostensible making-of documentary another character is shooting from around various corners, but you never get the slightest sense that Almodovar cares about any of it as more than an exercise in elegant script construction and gaudy costume design—and also, of course, as a showcase for Cruz, with whom he’s now worked four times. Their last film together, Volver, was to my mind a career high for both director and star: Almodovar’s most deeply felt and oddly moving picture, Cruz’s richest and least decorative performance. With that film, Almodovar seemed to have found an ideal balance between the overripe melodrama of his early work and his more contemplative (often a little too contemplative) “mature” period; I was looking eagerly forward to a series of late-career masterworks that would find the melancholy within the absurd, and vice versa. Maybe they’re still forthcoming, but the disappointing Broken Embraces is strictly marking time.