Review of Broken Embraces (2009) by Fascade F — 16 Jul 2010

Where Obsession and Love Collide.

Have you ever watched a movie or TV show or whatever with another work embedded and thought to yourself, "Wow. I'd really like to see that"? I mean, sometimes, they're deliberately terrible--a movie and a TV show I like both have embedded soap operas which look just terrible, the latter even by soap opera standards. When it's a song embedded, of course, you generally get the whole thing. Because, of course, that's easy. But sometimes, you watch whatever work is the framing device, or the main story, or however it works, and you want to see all of the other work. This is why the trailers from [i]Grindhouse[/i] are now trailers for real movies. (Not that I have any interest in the original movies, much less the new ones.) I would think it would be a delicate balance--you don't want people so caught up in the embedded work that they lose all interest in the main one, but unless it's supposed to be terrible, you want it to be something you can picture people watching. Which is why I think director Pedro Almodóvar would be pleased to know that I really want to see [i]Girls and Suitcases[/i] now.

Harry Caine (Lluís Homar) used to be a film director, who was Mateo Blanco (still Lluís Homar). He gave that up when he was blinded. We know there is a story behind his blindness, but he hasn't told it. One day, Harry finds out that financier Ernesto Martel (José Luis Gómez) has died. Soon after, a man calling himself Ray X (Rubén Ochandiano) comes to ask Harry's help in developing a fiction film. He says he directed a documentary sixteen years earlier. Harry throws him out. His manager, Judit García (Blanca Portillo), expresses great concern over the whole thing, but she has to go away. She leaves her son Diego (Tamar Novas) to look after Harry, but Diego accidentally overdoses and is taken care of by Harry instead. He finally persuades Harry to tell him what happened, why Ernest and Ray are so important, how Harry was blinded. It turns out to be the story of Mateo's last film, the aforementioned [i]Girls and Suitcases[/i]. It is also the story of Ernesto's mistress, the beautiful Lena (Penélope Cruz), who came to Ernesto so her father could die in peace and has stayed with him. She convinces him to let her audition for the film, which she does. She gets the lead role, which involves a great deal of work. She also falls in love with Mateo, which makes things very difficult.

I generally have no opinion of Penélope Cruz. She's beautiful, but so are a lot of other women I don't have any real opinion of. I've only seen one of her movies, so I don't know much about her acting ability. I got annoyed at her a few years ago for talking about the great characters for women Woody Allen writes. I know she'd been hooked up with Tom Cruise for a while, which only sticks because of their names. I'm not sure I think of her as someone who can inspire madness, but the fact of the matter is that people don't have to be anything special for that. Wallis, Duchess of Windsor, was kind of plain and apparently very much a shrew. Charles Manson, of course, was unattractive and crazy, an ex-con who had already spent more time in prison than out. Lena, on the other hand, was beautiful and charming. The camera loves Penélope Cruz, so of course it loves Lena. It is also true that an old and selfish man is likely to be possessive of a young and beautiful mistress. There is also an obvious possessiveness to any man who would become a producer of a film just to give his mistress what she wants. So whether Lena is deserving of such madness or not, it is unsurprising when when she inspires it.

In fact, in retrospect, little of what happens in the film is totally surprising. It's a simple plot dressed in the frills to make it original. It is said that there are no original plots, of course, and the adding of the unhappy son, [i]Girls and Suitcases[/i], and the blindness is perhaps not enough to make it one. However, I've always so distrusted that snobbery. Yes, it's true that, if you break stories down to their basest elements, they become the same in so many ways. If you do that with this movie, it is the story of a woman who leaves one man for another and all the consequences of that act. But surely a story is more than that. We may think of dressing it up--I called it so myself in this very paragraph. But the fact is, this story would not be the same without where and how Diego becomes ready to hear the story which has shaped his life in ways he has never understood. Even such a simple thing as Judit's trip to Barcelona with the Americans is important, because it gets her out of the way for the telling time. Reducing stories like that I think may be part of the cynicism which is so fashionable in places. People don't want there to be anything original, regardless of whether there is or not.

People are very seldom powered by anything so simple as hate. Hate burns, but it is rarely a useful fire. "Ray X" hated his father, but he didn't do anything about it until after his father was dead. Someone's hatred of Lena--I will not say whose--shaped the events of the story in ways which could not have been foreseen. But that's just it--the person committed one petty act, and all their lives were changed more drastically than was probable. Lena ended up hating Ernesto, and all it caused her to do was run away. And I think possibly Ernesto hated Lena every bit as much as he loved her. But all the hate in the movie manifested itself as simple, childish reactions. Making things wrong for each other. Running away. Running back. All anyone did was react; it's when there were more active emotions that things were done which were more complicated. Action was caused by love. By passion for one's work. There was blame enough to go around for the events of the story; Diego may be the only character who didn't shoulder at least some of it, and he was very young at the time. But the greatest blame may come from the fact that, in the end, no one really did anything.