A STEP TO EUROPE : "BROKEN EMBRACES"

Yes I know collectively there has been rather a lot of Almodovar in the blog lately. But the thing is you see that I sometimes get “batch lots” of certain directors. If I’m not /don’t become a fan, this fact slips by unnoticed as far as the blog is concerned. If, however, like Almodovar, I “discover” them, well I want to share them with you. Hence they keep appearing on the blog. Now, these mixed bags sometimes spontaneously appear. It’s rather like opening the fridge, finding out that you have various odds and ends, you know, one celeriac, one carrot, two tomatoes… All perfectly good in themselves but you can’t make a dish with either. So you just blend them together and make vegetable soup. Occasionally the combinations get rather random. So I do realize that at a cartoon dog and one of the greatest Spanish directors do not exactly mix. But we can like them both for different reasons, right? Right. Moving on…
Matteo Blanco is a screenwriter and director, but he has been living as one of his “nom de plume”s, Harry Cane for many years now. He is comfortably between projects at the moment and is seriously contemplating writing a vampire film with Diego, the son of his agent and life-long friend Judith when he is made aware of the death of a prominent businessman. To Matteo / Harry this brings memories flooding back, and these memories are not exactly happy ones. As he shares his story with Diego we go back in time to say how and why Matteo decided to abandon his real name and become a character, why Harry is blind and why he is so struck by the death of a man who seemingly has nothing to do with him at all…
I was, just for a minute, tempted to put this with Dr. Zhivago from a couple of months back and make a “star-crossed lovers” week. As you can imagine, there is a love story involved. As is some of Almodovar’s favorite themes: jealousy, obsession, changing into someone else and of course cinema. And it is the great success of the director to be able to use these same themes over and over – often with the same actresses, we all know he has his “favorite” actresses in his films like all directors – and yet make a different combination, come out with a different point of view on it every single time. I guess it is because they are very basic human emotions and since they are all slightly different with everyone, it is possible to capture many different sides to them so long as you’re sensitive enough to see it. As it is, Broken Embraces combines just the right amounts of mystery and tragedy. Penelope Cruz is as brilliant as ever. And in this film we also see different sides to love. How it can turn into obsession and ruin lives, how, combined with mourning it can also change lives and live on – but in a different way. Like his themes, Almodovar is also consistent in his brilliance. Well worth watching…