Almodovar returns with his trademark quirks

Spanish director Pedro Almodovar repeats his trademark movie tricks but returns this time with less passion. Nonetheless, his lead performer, dark-eyed Penelope Cruz, shines like a true movie star

Everything Pedro Almodovar fans love is in his latest film, Broken Embraces: a nod to Hollywood classics, an intense blend of melodrama and suspense, bright colors, celebration of the feminine in all shapes and forms, and its ultimate muse Penelope Cruz. With all this, you can’t help but feel the conscious effort and calculation by Almodovar to integrate all of these elements into the film.

In Broken Embraces (Los abrazos rotos), the Spanish director establishes his major characters with double identities – one in the present day and one 14 years ago – and tells the two mysteriously connected stories of the past and the present. We learn that the blind screenwriter Harry Caine (a mixture of Harry Lime of The Third Man and Citizen Kane, both played by Orson Welles) was once a director with a sight and a different name, Mateo Blanc (Lluis Homar); the keen producer Ray X was the nerdy gay son of a tycoon Ernesto Martel; and Lena was a former prostitute, Martel’s lover, and later on, an aspiring actress in love with the director of her one and only film.

Cruz shines like a star with Almodovar’s touch

Almodovar’s love for old-fashioned Hollywood melodrama and Hitchcockian suspense becomes the defining tone of the movie. His love of movies old and new manifests itself in the plot where we see two films within Broken Embraces. One is the hilarious Girls and Suitcases, the film Mateo directs Lena in homage to old Hollywood stars, while the other is a ‘making-of’ documentary Martel’s son unwittingly directs so that his father can spy on his girlfriend. The plot thickens when it’s revealed that the supporting characters Judit, Mateo’s long-time aide, and her son, Diego, have crucial roles in the unfolding of the drama, now and then.

When Almodovar stole the hearts of moviegoers everywhere three decades ago, he proved to be an auteur with his campy, melodramatic, gender-bending and passionate cinema that was absolutely unique. In Broken Embraces, however the passion seems to be gone, as it seems the director has detachedly included every item from a checklist on his own cinema in the film. In essence – and in a bizarre way – Almodovar has imitated his own cinema.

Despite this, there is one obvious item on which all can agree Almodovar’s passion still seems to be intact: his treatment of Penelope Cruz as a movie star. Whenever Cruz tries her craft in Hollywood, she becomes just another name among all the million-dollar actresses. But whenever Almodovar touches Cruz with his magic wand, she shines like a creature from another world, an eternal star.

Originally published in Hürriyet Daily News on 8 Jan. 2010