One of the many pleasures offered by Pedro Almodovar’s most recent offering, Broken Embraces (Los Abrazos Rotos), is the opportunity to see Penelope Cruz working as a real actress rather than just Latin window dressing for a Hollywood feature. It is sometimes hard to remember how good an actress she really is, and in Broken Embraces Almodovar truly makes her shine.
What is particularly amazing about Almodovar’s achievement with Cruz is that her role is not as the star or the leading character, but as a catalyst for revelations by others. Cruz’s character, Lena, remains a mystery to the end, but a mystery that lingers long after the credits have rolled.
As with many Almodovar films, a summary of the plot that took in all the many ramifications of the story would run for pages. In its barest outline, the story is that of Mateo Blanco, a former film director who years earlier lost his sight in a car accident and now lives as a reclusive but much sought after scriptwriter under the name of Harry Caine. The telling of his story is triggered by the appearance of Ray X, a character he soon identifies as the son of Ernesto Martel, a businessman who financed his last film and whose mistress, Lena (Penelope Cruz), he stole. Ray X wants Caine to write a script about the story of his relationship with his father’s mistress and Ray X’s own role in ending the affair in tragic circumstances as a form of revenge. A further layer of complexity is added by the presence of Judit (Blanca Portillo), a personal assistant who carries a torch for Caine, and in his blindness acts as his main connection with the outside world.
This story is leavened with an encyclopedic range of cinematic references to delight serious cinephiles. Almodovar announces his intention to pay respects to the giants on whose shoulders he proudly stands with the incongruously named Harry Caine, a reference to Harry Lime, the main character of The Third Man and Citizen Cain, the first played by Orson Wells, and the second directed by him. This is the first of many obvious and not so obvious cinematic references, which include Cruz playing an actress who is a dead ringer for Audrey Hepburn in Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1961) and extended quotations from Almodovar’s own Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown (Mujeres al Borde de un Ataque de Nervios, 1988).
There is no absolute separation between art and life in Broken Embraces, and while the constant referencing of other cinematic works could easily have become ponderous, for Almodovar this refusal to distinguish between the two is not so much an artistic conceit but a philosophical given.
The struggle between Harry/Mateo and Ernesto over Lena, in which the latter enlists his son, the future Ray X, to spy on Lena, could easily be yet another portrayal of machismo at work over a passive love object. With Almodovar, whose sympathies are usually more with his female characters, the dynamic is reversed, with Cruz’s Lena demanding the viewer’s attention, even though her physical presence never dominates the screen.
In Broken Embraces, Almodovar also gives free rein to his love of color and symbols, which he weaves into the warp of what might be described as a film noir soap opera. Images jump off the screen, such as the ornate pop art crucifixes that decorate the walls of both Harry’s and Judit’s house, and Lena as Audrey Hepburn suddenly donning a platinum blond wig.
For all the clever games, Almodovar has always insisted on telling a story that has a definite beginning, middle and end, though these are utterly jumbled up in Broken Embraces. This jigsaw is put back together with an ending that, although corny, manages to ring true. For all the cinematic fun and games, and there are enough of those for two art house movies, Broken Embraces is remarkable as a thoughtful work by a director who is perfectly at ease with deconstructing his oeuvre, dissecting the stories he has told in the past, and putting the elements back together in new ways.
Apart from Cruz’s outstanding performance, Lluis Homar’s Harry/Mateo is full of splendid contradictions between the assured and casually sensual director and the fearful, nostalgic blind man. Jose Luis Gomez’s Ernesto is full of suave menace and the hint of madness, and Blanca Portillo manages to suggest an extensive backstory with little more than her beleaguered gaze.
While perhaps a little too thoughtful or too playful to be utterly compelling as a movie, there is more than enough in Broken Embraces for audiences looking to test their knowledge of cinema history or simply wanting to see a good melodrama.
JUNE 30 to JULY 6 After being routed by the Japanese in the bloody battle of Baguashan (八卦山), Hsu Hsiang (徐驤) and a handful of surviving Hakka fighters sped toward Tainan. There, he would meet with Liu Yung-fu (劉永福), leader of the Black Flag Army who had assumed control of the resisting Republic of Formosa after its president and vice-president fled to China. Hsu, who had been fighting non-stop for over two months from Taoyuan to Changhua, was reportedly injured and exhausted. As the story goes, Liu advised that Hsu take shelter in China to recover and regroup, but Hsu steadfastly
Taiwan’s politics is mystifying to many foreign observers. Gosh, that is strange, considering just how logical and straightforward it all is. Let us take a step back and review. Thanks to the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and the Taiwan People’s Party (TPP), starting this year people will once again have Christmas Day off work. In 2002, the Scrooges in the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) said “bah, humbug” to that. The holiday is not actually Christmas, but rather Constitution Day, celebrating the enactment of the Constitution of the Republic of China (ROC) on December 25, 1947. The DPP and the then pan-blue dominated legislature
Focus Taiwan reported last week that government figures showed unemployment in Taiwan is at historic lows: “The local unemployment rate fell 0.02 percentage points from a month earlier to 3.30 percent in May, the lowest level for the month in 25 years.” Historical lows in joblessness occurred earlier this year as well. The context? Labor shortages. The National Development Council (NDC) expects that Taiwan will be short 400,000 workers by 2030, now just five years away. The depth of the labor crisis is masked by the hundreds of thousands of migrant workers which the economy absolutely depends on, and the
If you’ve lately been feeling that the “Jurassic Park” franchise has jumped an even more ancient creature — the shark — hold off any thoughts of extinction. Judging from the latest entry, there’s still life in this old dino series. Jurassic World Rebirth captures the awe and majesty of the overgrown lizards that’s been lacking for so many of the movies, which became just an endless cat-and-mouse in the dark between scared humans against T-Rexes or raptors. Jurassic World Rebirth lets in the daylight. Credit goes to screenwriter David Koepp, who penned the original Jurassic Park, and director Gareth Edwards, who knows
RSS