Broken Embraces - By Rich Hot

Dudes, Penelope Cruz is the reason God created movies. Pedro Almodovar has figured this out and is going to spend the rest of his movie-making life harnessing her arresting, on-screen bad-ass-ness. I'm certain he wants to marry and divorce her just as Godard did with all his female leads.

In Broken Embraces, Almodovar has made four movies. Harry's story, told in flashback, is the forerunning story. He is a famous movie director. The flashback story beings with us watching Harry, now blind, 'seeing with his hands' all over the hot girl that has just helped him cross the street. Moments later the second movie begins with a young vengeful, up-and-comer pitching a documentary he has made to Harry. He denies the protagonist documentarian but recognizes the voice of the doc-kid and the flashback begins taking us into the third movie of a kid filming Harry for a 'DVD-making-of-the-movie-extra-bit'. The kid has been commissioned by the lead character's (in Harry's movie)(Penelope Cruz) millionaire husband. The fourth movie, however, Harry making the movie with Cruz as the lead is where I stopped getting confused and started enjoying what was happening.

In this movie, I made the simple connection of Harry as Pedro Almodovar and Cruz as Cruz in 'All About My Mother' and 'Volver'. This made the movie cooler for me because up until this point this movie was un-like his other movies and therefore not enjoyable, yet. I like Almodovar's movies because of Cruz and because of how he uses the camera in a really original way. There is one scene that is impossible for me to describe but Roger Ebert can:

"Look at Almodovar's command of framing here. There's one unbroken shot so "illogical" it may even slip past you. There's urgent action on a sofa in the foreground and then a character stands and moves to the right, talking, and dawdles slightly and then moves to the left, and now we see for the first time the next room completely open to this one, and there is a young man seated at a table.

What? He must have been there all along, yet the foreground action took no notice of him, the camera didn't establish him, and now no acknowledgement is made of his incongruous presence.

I think this shot may be about the ability of camera placement and film editing to dictate absolutely what is and is not in a scene. I'm sure it also has meaning in terms of the characters, but I don't know what. It shows Almodovar saying he'll do things just for the hell of it and manage to keep a straight face."

The point is, that Almodovar takes really cool stories and films them in the coolest way he can think of doing it. Sometimes it works and sometimes it is annoying but the point is that he isn't 'doing what will win awards' but he is just doing cool crap. For instance, when the millionaire husband is watching voyeur footage shot by his son, the kid-documentarian, of the affiar between Cruz and Harry unfolding. We are watching the millionaire watch a movie that was made while a movie was being made. The audio of the voyeur flick is actually Cruz sitting behind her adulterated husband saying what we see her saying on the millionaire's screen. We aren't sure if she is really in the room or if a movie within a movie within a movie is playing in her husaband's head. This was cool.

Broken Embraces is one of the cooler movies I have seen in a while. Cool.