The Romantics
Pedro Almodóvar with Penélope Cruz
Four films together: Live Flesh (1997), All About My Mother (1999), Volver (2006), and Broken Embraces (2009).
Broken Embraces has a valedictory feel to it, or at least it conveys a sense that the 60-year-old Almodóvar—a man for whom it was once compulsory to use the words enfant terrible—is taking stock of his life. The movie is about a filmmaker, cruelly robbed of sight, who recounts to a young man the tragic story of his greatest love: a stunning beauty he rescued from the gilded clutches of kept-womanhood. There are stylistic nods to the 1950s weepie-meister Douglas Sirk and to Michael Powell’s sick-joke movie Peeping Tom. There are glimpses of the movie that the director made with his doomed love, a Day-Glo bauble that harkens back to Almodóvar’s youthful 1980s “wacky” period. And there is Cruz. Almodóvar uses his fractured narrative to frame her in all manner of looks and ways: in a Marilyn wig, in drab secretarial gear, in the Chuck Close–like pixelation of enlarged, super-slo-mo playback … all in the cause of proving that the camera loves her as much as ol’ Pedro does.