With Broken Embraces, Almodóvar has crafted a film about cinema, about life and about his current muse,
Penélope Cruz. Claims of a drop in excellence are unjustified. With Almodóvar as one of cinema’s most consistent and prolific auteurs, it is not so much a question of quality but connection. Audiences expecting a more character-based narrative along the lines of his earlier films such as All About My Mother or Volver may be thrown. The individuals that populate this film are more screenplay devices then they are living, breathing people. Broken Embraces is a 50s melodrama coated in film noir that leaves no room for intimate character exploration within it’s labyrinth of a plot. But with so much to savour, who really cares?
The film takes place over multiple time frames, flipping back and forth with artful ease. At the centre of the story is aspiring actress Lena (Penélope Cruz) 
who falls in love with film director Mateo Blanco (Lluís Homar) on the set of her first film. Things become complicated when Ernesto Martel, her sleazy provider and a powerful government official, discovers the affair.
Cruz is one of the most beautiful women in the world and Almodóvar’s rapturous obsession with her physical perfection is evident in every frame. She does not deliver the kind of emotional complexity she displayed in Volver, but she is also not required to. In the tradition of the great actresses of Hollywood melodrama, Cruz projects an assortment of vivid archetypes – daughter, martyr, lover, whore. In supporting roles, Homar plays his respective characters Harry Caine and Mateo Blanco with humour and poignancy and as Ernesto Martel, José Luis Gómez brilliantly suggests the malice inherent in his obsession 
for Lena.
What preoccupies Almodóvar in this film, as it has in his previous work, is filmmaking itself and his own role in the process. Towards the end there is a beautiful image in which the hands of a blind man feel their way across a pixilated home movie footage of a couple’s embrace. These hands could very well be Almodóvar’s, feeling passionately for images to string together into sublime films such as this.
NOTE: “Broken Embraces” has been nominated for a Golden Globe for best foreign language film.
Australian release date from 17th December
Director: Pedro Almodóvar
Cast: Penélope Cruz, Lluís Homar, Blanca Portillo, José Luis Gómez
