BROKEN EMBRACES sees a blind film director reminiscing about an on-set love affair he had with Penelope Cruz.

STARRING: Penelope Cruz, Lluís Homar, Blanca Portillo, José Luis Gómez, Rubén Ochandiano, Tamar Novas and Ángela Molina
 
Written and Directed by Pedro Almodóvar
 
RELEASED: 28 August 2009
 
CERTIFICATE: 15a / 15
R/T: 128 min

BROKEN EMBRACES starts with by allowing the viewer to watch a test shot of a movie with almost all of the principle characters popping in and out of focus. The test shots are for the 1994 film within the film “Girls and Suitcases” which is the brainchild of writer/director Harry Caine.

Fast forward to 2008 and Harry Caine has knocked the directing on the head due to a nasty bout of blindness. He does however continue to write scripts with the aid of Diego, his agent’s son.

Harry’s current life is the anchor for this picture but it bops back and forth between his life and the life of actress Lena before she was an actress. Eventually however the film settles into a series of longer flashbacks as Harry entertains Diego with his tail of an affair on the set of Girls and Suitcases while the youngster recuperates from a disco biscuit induced coma.

That is a very simplistic rendition of the story. There are several other threads that wrap themselves around Harry but it is difficult to sum them up without blowing all of the plot lines. It sounds complicated because it is. Writer/director, Pedro Almodóvar has given himself several plates to keep in the air but he does a very good job of keeping them spinning without making the whole thing overly confusing.

At the core we are watching how a man who has been living on cruise control after losing nearly all that he had rediscovers himself and his passion.

The movie treats Harry’s disability with a level of respect that you might not encounter from a Hollywood flick. Within five minutes Almodóvar turns the cliché of a blind person feeling somebody’s face to get to know them. Harry uses the trick on a young lady who is reading him the paper to get himself some afternoon nookie. It is only when she is gone that we realise she was just some floosie he picked up on his way home. Harry isn’t crippled by his disability but there is something else stopping him from really living his life.

Broken Embraces is a great exorcise in the art of story telling but it is not without its flaws. One of the characters seems crammed in and isn’t fully fleshed out as result, and there is an unnecessary plot twist that is so obvious Stevie Wonder could see it coming. These are only trifling issues compared to the fact that Girls With Suitcases looks like a better film than Broken Emraces. Lena’s character bounces off of her neighbour in a classic fashion while looking like Audrey Hepburn. The film within the film shouldn’t be better than the film outside of the film because shines the film in a bad light…if you know what I mean.

It’s all very complicated.