Broken Embraces

Colour, 35 mm
Spain, 2009, 129 min
Section: Open Eyes

Synopsis

His name was Mateo Blanco and he used to be a film director. After he loses his sight and the woman he loved in a tragic accident, he becomes a writer and assumes the pseudonym Harry Caine. His agent Judith looks after him devotedly and her son Diego helps him out as his assistant. Lena is the secretary of the powerful businessman Ernesto Martel, to whom she is indebted for helping her sick father. Ernesto has a son who wants to become a director. He shows the script to Harry, but is rejected. These are the characters Pedro Almodóvar introduces during the first part of his new film. The complex story spread over several time frames focuses on Lena who longs to escape Martel’s authority and become an actress. Except that he alone is able to finance the film… The new melodrama by Pedro Almodóvar about passionate love, death, grief, jealousy, betrayal, the desire to dominate, and also remorse, smacks of "film noir” but also incorporates elements of the grotesque, humour and, above all, references to the filmmaker’s earlier cult movies. Lena is played by the enchanting Penélope Cruz, but the cast also includes some of Almodóvar’s other favourites from previous works.

About the director

Pedro Almodóvar (b. 1949, Calzada de Calatrava) hails from the land of Don Quixote. Like Buňuel, he was also educated in a monastic school, from where he would escape to watch forbidden films. He lived in Madrid from the age of 17, where he became a leading figure of the underground movement "movida madrileňa”. His feature debut was the "punk” film Pepi, Luci, Bom and the Other Girls on the Heap (1980). Almodóvar’s films were labelled as scandalous by the critics. He began to make a name for himself internationally with What Have I Done to Deserve This? (1984), then enjoyed true world-wide success with the film Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown (1987 – Oscar and Felix nominations). Flower of My Secret won Best Actress at the 31st Karlovy Vary IFF. The films All about My Mother (1999) and Talk to Her (2002) won Oscars. His subsequent films Bad Education (2004) and Volver (2006) were also screened at Karlovy Vary.