Culture Vulture: 11 reasons to see “Broken Embraces”
Director Pedro Almodovar and Penelope Cruz: Their new film probes the varieties of love.
By Helen Epstein
“Broken Embraces” at Kendall Square and Embassy Cinemas
1: Pedro Almodovar, one of the most interesting directorial sensibilities of our time, whose films probe our infinite varieties of experience in love and work
2: Penelope Cruz, an original who also incarnates the best of the many movie stars — American and European — who came before her
3: A meditation on forgiveness that draws, like Almodovar’s colors, on a full and many shaded palette of emotions
4: A multilayered and complicated story, involving a variety of characters whose class, age, and gender cover a wide spectrum of society
5: A Truffaut-evoking meditation on filmmaking, jealousy and revenge
6: A repertory company of skilled actors
7: Wonderful roles for women (as usual, not one or two but several great parts)
8: A fabulously seductive soundtrack
9: A striking tenderness in portraying difficult interpersonal transactions
10: A script so smart and a pace so swift that (unlike in a Bergman film, say) there is no time to read the subtitles and take in the visuals at once
11: A film you want to go back and see a second, perhaps third, time and still not be sure you grasped 90% of what you saw.
Helen Epstein’s essay on “Narrative in Memoir and Psychoanalysis” appears in this winter’s issue of “Psychoanalytical Perspectives” and in the newly published “Ecrire la Vie.
Tagged: Broken Embraces, Culture Vulture, Film, Pedro Almodovar, Penelope Cruz
Almodovar’s latest film is also a powerful example of an artist’s brilliant examination of, and insightful meditation about his own art form — movie making.
In Broken Embraces, a blind film-maker edits his own movie, film-making is an integral part of the plot, and a grainy short film provides the organizing structure for the resolution of this story of jealousy, revenge, guilt and forgiveness.