Los Abrazos Rotos (Broken Embraces), dir. Pedro Almodóvar (2009)

Almódovar, as he is affectionately known, is admired as a kind of Iberian Fellini. His films are filled with extravagance characterized by flesh, passion, color, drama with a clear debt to melodrama and telenovela style, and above all a clear love of cinema itself. Broken Embraces continues that tradition, though the film doesn’t feel as climactic to the Almódovar ouvre as Live Flesh or All About my Mother. Other baroque Almódovar films have stronger legs of their own: they’re so tender, moving, and brilliantly scripted that they rise above loving pastiche. Broken Embraces is often beautiful, to be sure, but it remains careful, obsessive kitsch.

The film’s most memorable moment involves Penélope Cruz’s transformation from a corporate office worker and sometime prostitute to an actress. At the behest of her director, she tries on different wigs and flashes the same glossy smile. It’s inviting and distancing all at once: flashes go off all around her, and the producers laugh happily at the young starlet’s beauty. It could be an unwritten scene from Breakfast at Tiffany’s or Funny Face, and I get the feeling that that’s precisely what Almódovar is looking for: a kind of cinematic Trojan Horse that infiltrates so lovingly the styles from which its inspiration is culled that they become inseparable.

At its core, this is a film about duplicity and images. As usual, Almódovar utilizes a web of classic generic elements to explore themes fundamental to cinema itself. He sees the world in genre, in cinema. When his vision is less fully realized, it comes out like Broken Embraces. Yet the stories he culls—be they “lesser” or “greater” Almódovar—remain beautiful because he is the cinephile par excellence. I can only highlight a few, since the plot is dense and circular: the film director, now blind, who has changed his name to Harry Caine; Cruz two-timing her wealthy, elderly lover Ernesto Martel, who keeps a close eye on her through the camera-eyes of his son (also Ernesto Martel). Martel the elder watches his son’s videos obsessively, trying to divine whether or not his lover is having an affair. Later, Caine, before bedding the latest in a line of good Samaritans kind enough to help a blind man cross the street, asks her to describe herself to him: the image forms in his mind, softening the blow of his blindness. They all live through the image, and though Almódovar is aware of the lies, he also loves them.

For Almódovar, there is no doubt that film is a way of seeing, of living. His is a world where Marilyn is an idol above any other, where the often subversive pleasures of classic Hollywood cinema are admired and considered with intelligence. The film is itself a narrative reflection on film itself. Even though Broken Embraces is a not great film, but it still manages to demonstrate Almódovar’s dedication to the cinema. For this, it remains an earnest effort if not a brilliant one.