Broken Embraces (2009)
The pretend democratizing of superstars (twitters, blogs, Facebook, what-have-you) has only rubbed the gulf in privilege between the wealthy/famous and the rest of us in our faces. There’s condescension in so many superstars’ insistence in being “every day” or “average” – it only further establishes how much many of them have forgotten what true everyday (meaning the middle class) is; or are merely saying whatever is convenient to appear appropriately modest. This hypocrisy tarnishes the illusion of movies, diminishing the pleasure of so many major superstar movies, these stars, to further waterproof their ego, must revel in their normality and expose their banality – perverting our rights to have illusions about them. In many superstar pictures these days (the dreadful Duplicity comes to mind) you can’t help but think of the deals and the Us Magazine covers, and what Owen’s and Roberts’ agents must have had to haggle over to get everyone in the same room. There’s no magic in many of these pictures, only calculation – and self-congratulation. There’s always been calculation, of course, but many of the old stars were at least polite enough to admit, or allow us to believe, that they were gods.
It’s sometimes difficult to explain why just pretty good movies appeal to us so, but this over-publicized cultural rot at least partially explains the immense relief of the recent Penélope Cruz/Pedro Almodóvar collaborations – Volver and now Broken Embraces (there are others, but these most embody my point). In Volver, Almodóvar seemed to be consciously taking Cruz back from the mediocre American pictures that dwarfed her gentle frame, and that made her appear to be another not-quite-fed international starlet with problems speaking English. For Volver, Almodóvar gave Cruz a fake butt, not just as a stunt, but to curve her out, plump her up, bring her closer to the ground as his idealized Earth mother. Almodóvar feasted on Cruz’s curves but not in a distastefully leering way. Pedro Almodóvar – once the flamboyant bad boy with several NC-17s under his belt – has gone relatively straight, but not out of a conscious concession to anything – his pictures have evolved into older man’s movies, less intense, more resigned, more amused, but – in the spirit of many older men – they appreciate the flesh that youth take for granted.
I liked Volver, didn’t love it, you do miss a bit of Almodóvar’s friction, energy and wild man id/glee, as he has probably grown too comfortable to produce really amazing emotionally combustible movies (Broken Embraces lacks the force and originality of De Palma’s in some ways similar Femme Fatale). Great for Almodóvar; it suggests an inner peace and confidence, still, good for us, only in a different way. Broken Embraces is another Almodóvar tribute to Cruz, and this one, mostly unlike Volver, has been fashioned with a number of the director’s past preoccupations in mind: it’s a kinda thriller (Almodóvar’s Hitchcock/ De Palma influences have a way of being cancelled out by his women’s picture tendencies) with crippled artists at the mercy of the divide between art and life. The picture is a reflexive wall of movies and movies-within-movies.
I won’t bother with the narrative, it doesn’t really matter; it’s a smooth, leisurely hodge-podge of love triangles and the usual Vertigo/1950s noir references that have become obligatory in movie-or-life reality tugs-of-war. Instead, I would like to recall to you three moments where the Almodóvar/Cruz mojo particularly crystallizes.
The first is the first proper scene, possibly the best in the movie, in which our hero, currently called Harry Caine (he will, of course, have another identity as well), a writer in his 50s, now blind, asks a beautiful young woman to read to him. They’ve clearly just met, and the young woman reads to Harry items that will come to inform the plot later on. The beautiful woman reads to Harry and eventually asks him what else he wants to hear. He tells her that he wants to know about her – her eyes, her hair, her clothes, her breasts – and we see the woman in a series of intense close ups that suggests greatness of feeling and desire, and we see the woman respond to Harry, a crisp, well-maintained man for his age, as he experiences her breasts with his hands which leads to an afternoon on the couch. Almodóvar – unlike mostly asexual American movies – allows the characters to enjoy touching one another (a scene in his Live Flesh of a character hungrily going down on his wife has never left me) – we can feel the pores in the gorgeous woman’s skin as Harry takes her in. This scene has little to do with the plot, and everything to do with the story, which basically boils down to an old but necessarily oft-repeated moral: drink your milk while you can.
The second scene, partially featured in the trailer, has Cruz shooting a movie for another incarnation of Harry Caine, posing in front of a dressing room mirror in a series of wigs that are cheekily, affectionately meant to conjure icons of the past, especially Audrey Hepburn. This is cute and gives Cruz a moment of play amongst her scenes of anguish as she squirms between two dominating men throughout the picture, and also cements Almodóvar’s intensity of feeling for his star: he’s, without irony, promoting Cruz to the pantheon. (It’s a less obsessive Lynch trick, though Lynch always mixes a little post-modernism in.) This business could be silly or laughable, but Cruz, who gives a memorable playful/intense martyr performance, rises to the occasion – she fills Audrey’s shoes and creates an endearingly awkward siren of her own. (The awkwardness lets her be human, but doesn’t ever pretend that she’s anything less than a glorious movie fantasy.)
The third scene, a few images, has a mourning Harry (underplayed, poignantly , by Lluís Homar) reaching at a screen he can’t see that projects the last images of a loved one’s life – the images slowed down in movie/memory reverie. I’ve read a few complaints that this moment, the most memorable image in the picture, is a steal from a Godard picture that I haven’t seen. No matter, Almodóvar builds to it beautifully and it completes his Embrace – a poem to the quiet, taken-for-granted salvation of the pretend.
