With its opening scene, in which a blind writer seduces the hot young woman who has just helped him cross the street, “Broken Embraces” warns you to expect just about anything.
In a film by Pedro Almodovar, that’s the only course of action. The Spanish director, whose steady output has included “Volver” and “Talk to Her,” returns here with a typically stylish drama that folds neatly (maybe too neatly) into his previous work.
That blind writer is a former filmmaker now working (since the accident that blinded him) under the pseudonym Harry Caine; he’s played by Lluis Homar. Harry is haunted by the accident and its circumstances, which happened 14 years earlier.
The arrival of an obnoxious young director, who calls himself Ray X, sends Harry into detailed flashbacks about the past. I mean it as a compliment when I say the actor who plays Ray X, Ruben Ochandiano, is perfectly horrid in the role.
Flashbacks, long ones, get us into Harry’s world as a successful film director and his intense relationship with an actress, Lena (Penelope Cruz). They worked on a movie, “Girls and Suitcases,” the excerpts from which make it look more than a little like Pedro Almodovar’s breakthrough picture, “Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown.”
Lena has her tangled story, too. For a variety of heart-tugging reasons, she had become the paid companion of an extremely wealthy man (Jose Luis Gomez).
Other characters flit around the story, notably Harry’s longtime assistant (Blanca Portillo). We can tell she’s been serving at his beck and call all these years, and probably nurses a combination of loyalty and hostility that would come with sacrificing her own personality to the great genius.
Almodovar is always good with those kinds of peripheral characters, the precisely drawn, neurotic types. And his customary design sense is here too, his great eye for colors and patterns that stop just short of being crazy.
He’s given another luscious role to Penelope Cruz, who starred for him in “Volver.” She really seems like a movie queen from the 1960s, which is probably how Almodovar wants her to come across.
For all that, “Broken Embraces” has an underwhelming quality that makes it seem like more of the same from this director. (I can never remember the plots of Almodovar’s films enough to tell one from another — and I like his movies.)
The story in this case might have come from a glossy melodrama of the ’50s, but diced up in a new way. Maybe I’ll remember it when his next movie comes out, maybe not, but it certainly is absorbing for two hours.
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