Broken Embraces (Los Abrozos Rotos)

These are my notes for Broken Embraces which we will screen on Sunday evening:

Broken Embraces (Los Abrozos Rotos)

Spain 2009 127 minutes

Director: Pedro Almodovar

Starring: Angela Molina, Blanca Portillo, Jose Luiz Gomez, Lluis Homar, Penelope Cruz, Ruben Ochandiano and Tamar Novas

Nominations and Awards

• Nominated for BAFTA (Best Film not in the English language)

• Nominated for Palme d’Or at Cannes Film Festival

“...a richly enjoyable piece of work, slick and sleek, with a sensuous feel for the cinematic surfaces of things and, as ever, self-reflexively infatuated with the business of cinema itself.”


Peter Bradshaw

Harry Caine (Lluis Homar) is a blind scriptwriter who is assisted by his faithful assistant Judit (Blanca Portillo) and her son Diego (Tamar Novas).  His past catches up with him when he hears of the death of Ernesto Martel (Jose Luiz Gomez), a wealthy businessman who had hired him, then known as Mateo Blanco, to direct an ironic comedy called Girls and Suitcases and starring the beautiful Lena (Penelope Cruz) who had become Martel’s mistress to pay her father’s medical bills.  Blanco fell in love with Lena, and Martel sent his gay son to film the making of the film and to give him the daily footage which he obsessively scrutinised.  Blanco and Lena ran away together, but they were involved in a car crash which left Blanco blind.

Almodovar has a lifelong obsession with cinema, and cinematic references homages and quotations appear throughout his films and are often part of their fabric: All About My Mother combines elements of All About Eve and A Streetcar Named Desire, but Broken Embraces is actually about film and the process of making films, which Almodovar suggests is a metaphor for life itself.  The style of the film is 1950s American film noir, but the story, with its dual narrative and father/son and straight gay opposites is reminiscent of other Almodovar films.  Additionally Girls and Suitcases, is a pastiche of Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown (1987) which was Almodovar’s first major success.  The cast also includes many Almodovar regulars such as Angela Molina and Penelope Cruz (in her fourth Almodovar film).

The film was first screened in competition in the 2009 Cannes Film Festival along with Inglourious Basterds and Looking For Eric but lost the Palme d’Or to Michael Haneke’s The White Ribbon (which we screened in our 2009 season).