Translated material
Loosening your grip
Pedro Almodovar's new film "Broken Embraces" has been released.
The plot of "Broken Embraces", as often in Almodóvar's works, is constructed as a series of flashbacks, gradually compensating for the initial incomprehensibility of the story. Therefore, it is not very correct to retell it linearly, but we will try to minimize this story.Matteo Blanco, a playwright blinded by a car accident, writes scripts with the help of a friend's helpful son, sleeps with random girls who agree to take a handsome old man across the street, and lives quite happily in his own way until a young director nicknamed Ray X appears in his life. A new acquaintance turns out to be an uninvited guest from the past, and Matteo begins to remember. Fifteen years ago, the screenwriter was also a director; he never finished his last film, but thanks to him he met Lena (Penelope Cruz), the former secretary and mistress of the oppressive rich man Ernesto, who decided to become an actress. Lena auditions for a role in Matteo's film, passes the casting and soon begins an affair with the director, but there are many obstacles to its happy course.
As in almost all of Almodóvar’s films since the second half of the 90s, in “Broken Embraces” the past gradually eats away at the present, bringing it to light. “Embraces” was filmed in Almodóvar’s favorite “wrong detective” genre, in which there is no crime as such, but the subject of the investigation is passion. In this line, “Broken Embraces” is perhaps a bit of a pass-through film. It finally captures Almodovar's transformation from enfant terrible into a master polishing his style and slightly making fun of his own old paintings.
In his last films, Almodóvar achieved an incredible density of frame, ideally corresponding to his darkly tender stories - the viewer could hardly look closely at his picture, he himself got stuck in it and floundered as if in a stuffy embrace. In the new film, Almodóvar loosens his grip slightly, as the title suggests. Compared to “Bad Education” and “The Return,” “Broken Embraces” has a slight softening of manner. Almodovar's polish still creeps into the episodes, but as a kind of author's stamp. And the problem with “Embraces” seems to be precisely this inflated sense of “auteur” cinema.
Like “Bad Education,” this is a film about a director, therefore, it is a reflection on the theme of “cinema about cinema.” But if “Education” was distinguished by a painfully personal intonation, in “Embraces” it, on the contrary, is calm, “deserved” in its own way. This, of course, doesn’t suit Almodóvar very well. Such a detached intonation makes one perceive the film as a kind of “statement of creativity” - a form of expression that the director has always avoided, preferring a shout. And the film falls slightly into this gap between the still quite exuberant manner and sluggish content.
As a result, what remains in the memory (with its tail sticking out of this gap) are primarily the scenes from the film “Girls and Suitcases”, which Matteo is directing - Almodóvar’s funniest parody of his early self, especially “Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown”. Before the release of Embrace, Almodóvar released another excerpt of Girls and Suitcases on Spanish television as a separate short film called The Cannibal Counselor (the film is available in Russian on the Internet). Because of these wonderfully lightweight inserts, there remains a slight feeling of dissatisfaction - it seems that Almodóvar would have been better off making the completely stupid “Girls and Suitcases” than the thoughtful “Broken Embraces.”
Although all this does not negate the fact that the two-hour film is almost never boring to watch, not least thanks to the beauty of Penelope Cruz, which would have pulled out a much more melancholy picture.