"Los Abrazos Rotos"

Pedro Almodóvar has always managed to combine elegance and exuberance, and his latest movie is no exception: a richly enjoyable piece of work, slick and sleek, with a sensuous feel for the cinematic surfaces of things and, as ever, self-reflexively infatuated with the business of cinema itself. Yet I wonder if Almodóvar isn't in danger of retreading old ideas. It doesn't quite match the heartfelt power of his 2006 Cannes film festival contender, Volver; Broken Embraces is always conspicuously concerned with passion, but without being itself fully passionate.

The action of the movie unfolds in two periods: flashing back and forth between the present day and 1994. It is a measure of Almodóvar's absolute technical mastery, and that of his editor José Salcedo, that this is never disconcerting or confusing. Lluís Homar plays Mateo, a former film director who lost his sight in a car crash whose full tragic importance is only disclosed in the movie's closing act. Now he writes screenplays under his pen name "Harry Caine", a pseudonymity which parallels Mateo's yearning to escape his ruined real self for the fantasy-refuge of the cinema. A newspaper obituary of a shady financier, Ernesto Martel, tremendously played by José Luis Gómez, triggers memories of his movie-making career in the 90s: Martel bankrolled Mateo's final movie on condition that his mistress was given the lead.

 

 

This of course is Lena, played by Penélope Cruz in a state of almost hyperreal gorgeousness, a sublime beauty in whose presence Almodóvar's camera goes into a kind of swooning trance, and whose exquisiteness consists at least partly in its fabricated quality; she is part of cinema's magnificent artifice. When Lena poses for still shots in a Marilyn wig, an ecstatic Mateo tells her: "Don't smile, the wig is false enough." Naturally, Mateo and Lena begin an affair, and the obsessively jealous Martel gets his highly-strung gay son from a previous marriage to spy on them with a video camera, on the pretence of preparing a "making of" segment for the DVD. In torments, old Martel watches this grainy surveillance footage every night, like a producer watching the daily rushes, while a lip-reader must recite the lovers' amorous whisperings live.

 

The film-within-a-film motif is head-spinningly sophisticated, though the theme of cinema itself within cinema (traditionally rather overrated by cinephiles in terms of interest and importance) is kept fresh and alive through Almodóvar's sheer energy. His style harks back to Hitchcock and Douglas Sirk; the allusions are technically splendid and utterly confident, though this self-awareness is a little lacking in substance and weight. After the film is over, its images and characters may well vanish into the air leaving little or no residue in your memory, yet I defy anybody to watch it without a tingle of pure moviegoing pleasure.