It is ironic that, of all Almodovar’s films, Broken Embraces is the biggest budget and the greatest length, yet it is also the dullest. His devoted fans will be delighted, but those who enjoyed Volver will be disappointed.
Broken Embraces (2009)
Tomatometer
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Reviews Counted:65
Fresh:53
Rotten:12
Average Rating:6.7/10
Consensus: Pedro Almodovar's fourth film with Penélope Cruz isn't his finest work, but he brings his signature visual brilliance to this noirish tale, and the cast turns in some first-class performances.
Rated: 15 [See Full Rating] for sexual content, language and some drug material
Genre: Foreign Films
Theatrical Release:28-08-2009
Synopsis:
A man writes, lives and loves in darkness. Fourteen years before, he was in a brutal car rash on the island of Lanzarote. In the accident, he not only lost his sight, he also lost , thef his...
A man writes, lives and loves in darkness. Fourteen years before, he was in a brutal car rash on the island of Lanzarote. In the accident, he not only lost his sight, he also lost , thef his life.
Lena love o This man uses two names: Harry Caine, a playful pseudonym with which he signs his literary works, stories and scripts, and Mateo Blanco, his real name, with which he lives and signs the film he directs. After the accident, Mateo Blanco reduces himself to his seudonym, Harry Caine. If he can’t direct films he can only survive with the idea that
Mateo Blanco died on Lanzarote with his beloved Lena. In the present day, Harry Caine lives thanks to the scripts he writes and to the help he gets rom his faithful former production manager, Judit García, and from Diego, her son, his
secretary, typist and guide. Since he decided to live and tell stories, Harry is an active, attractive blind man who has
developed all his other senses in order to enjoy life, on a basis of irony and self‐induced amnesia. He has erased from his biography any trace of his first identity, Mateo Blanco. One night Diego has an accident and Harry takes care of him (his mother, Judit, is out of Madrid and they decide not to tell her anything so as not to alarm her). During the first nights of his convalescence, Diego asks him about the time when he answered to the name of Mateo Blanco, after a moment of astonishment Harry can’t refuse and he tells Diego hat happened fourteen years before with the idea of entertaining him, just as a father
tells his little child a story so that he’ll fall asleep. The story of Mateo, Lena,
Judit and Ernesto Martel is a story of “amour fou”, dominated by fatality, jealously, the abuse of power, treachery and a guilt complex. A moving and terrible story, the most expressive image of which is the photo of two lovers embracing, torn into a thousand pieces. --© Sony Pictures Classics
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Starring: Penélope Cruz, Lluis Homar, Lola Dueñas, Ángela Molina
Starring: Penélope Cruz, Lluis Homar, Lola Dueñas, Ángela Molina, Carlos Leal, Ruben Ochandiano, Rossy De Palma, Tamar Novas, Blanca Portillo, Kiti Manver, Chus Lampreave
Director: Pedro Almodóvar
Director: Pedro Almodóvar
Screenwriter: Pedro Almodóvar
Producer: Agustin Almodovar
Composer: Alberto Iglesias
Studio: Sony Pictures Classics
Reviews for Broken Embraces
Gorgeous and seductive, if pitched at Almodóvar fans and perhaps a touch long. Those drawn by Cruz’s divadom will wonder why it takes so long to get to her — though she is wholly dazzling when it does.
While some of Almodóvar’s films are out-and-out heartbreakers – perfect storms of melodrama, storytelling and extreme living – this is a more cerebral, self-reflective and noir-ish affair.
Pedro Almodóvar is a film-maker so innately talented that even when half-cocked, as he is in Broken Embraces, he can somehow produce a movie that is effortlessly superior to most features.
Broken Embraces is a film in which the director demonstrates a continuing, virtuoso fluency in a cinematic language that he himself invented. It's an embrace I want to submit to.
Broken Embraces is a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside a slightly overindulgent parade of gushing film references.
Like an elaborately woven cobweb, it’s a marvel but so full of holes that it’s all too easily swept from memory.
Almodóvar's natural affinity with women (particularly women who are forced to act tough) enables an easy balance of noirish grit and that high melodrama which has become his trademark.
Entertaining enough with visuals to die for, but definitely not as emotionally rewarding as some of this director's other recent pictures.
Despite first-class performances – from Cruz, Gomez and Homar – Almodovar’s narrative appears laboured, offering none of the surprises that lent vim and vigour to his earlier outings.
Your eyeballs will relish Almodóvar’s movie-movie cocktail, but it’d be nice to see him serve up some fresh flavours. Despite the tactile direction, there isn’t enough to resonate post-film.
The director’s previous films...are all, in some way, about cinema – but this need is especially acute in Broken Embraces, which eats its own tail.
His films can be uncomfortably navel-gazing, and that’s the case in this somewhat maudlin contemplation of the woes of film-making and the life artistic.
The film may lack great depth, but it is a visual treat about films within films and packed with top performances.
The Spanish director's noirish touches are a delight to behold and there are few film makers who can touch him for sheer visual artistry.
Can Pedro Almodóvar make a bad film? The answer seems to be no, even when he might be accused of trying. Broken Embraces has a mazy plot in which a poor director would lose himself fast.
The director is toying with us, he knows it, and he knows we know it. This isn't a dud, it's just a small disappointment.
One of the most challenging and visually accomplished films of Almodóvar’s long career.
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