ViewGuide

Created Jan 16, 2010 03:01PM PST • Edited Dec 18, 2020 06:10PM PST

1. Quality

2. Summary

   Great 4.0

   Penélope Cruz plays the object of desire for two powerful men, a handsome filmmaker and a rapacious businessman, in Broken Embraces. Hmm, Pedro Almodóvar’s latest creation includes more than a little wish fulfillment, doesn’t it: He projects himself as the virile lover of his muse and conjures up a cliché capitalist as a craven destroyer of beauty.

   Fortunately he does all this with consummate skill and a great Screen Queen at the movie’s center. So it’s more than worth seeing for fans of Euro cinema and/or Cruz. She’s mucho dynamic in her native Spanish.

   Regarding that last: the dialog comes fast and furious. So be prepared to read the captions rápidamente.

4. Acting

   Great 4.0

   A true Queen of the Movies, Penélope Cruz is leggy and ravishing, lithe yet voluptuous, strong yet vulnerable. Here she plays an upstanding gal who resorts to prostitution, a Spanish Pretty Woman who puts Julia Roberts to shame. As if that’s not enough, she easily assumes an Audrey Hepburn look in Broken Embrace’s movie-within-a-movie. Bravo!

   Lluís Homar, a longstanding star of the Spanish stage and screen, deftly plays her handsome paramour, Almodóvar’s alter ego. Square-jawed yet blind, he’s sufficiently charming to believably pick up a beautiful model half his age.

   Spanish cover girl Kira Miró plays the model. Her verbal self-description – followed by a fairly explicit sex scene – nicely heats up the beginning of the movie.

   The rest of the cast are generally strong as well.

   • Rubén Ochandiano as a gay twerp.
   • Blanca Portillo as an unrequited lover.
   • Tamar Novas as her handsome club-going son.
   • José Luis Gómez as a jealous tycoon.

5. Male Stars Very Good 3.5

   Homar

6. Female Stars Really Great 4.5

   Cruz

7. Female Costars Very Good 3.5

   Blanca Portillo, Kira Miró

8. Male Costars Very Good 3.5

   José Luis Gómez, Rubén Ochandiano, Tamar Novas

10. Film

    Great 4.0

    Well constructed if a bit over-wrought, Almodóvar’s ambitious story conjures Cruz as a kept woman who falls in love with a handsome auteur. This sort of self-referential aggrandizement brings to mind Fellini’s 8½ and Woody Allen’s Vicky Cristina Barcelona (also starring Penélope Cruz).

11. Direction Really Great 4.5

    Almodóvar brilliantly creates a movie within the movie, basing it on his own Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown. Calling it Women and Suitcases, he gives it a high gloss pop sensibility, drenching it in color, red especially: tears falling on tomatoes is one particularly scarlet image.

12. Play Very Good 3.5

    The melodrama around a movie director becomes a bit tiresome and more than a bit predictable by the final reel.

13. Music Very Good 3.5

14. Visuals Very Good 3.5
15. Content

16. Edge

    Risqué 2.3

    Great sex. Cruz gets ravished by middle-aged Lluís Homar, who also has a blind hookup with Kira Miró at the start of the movie. You go dandy.

    An alphabet soup of club drugs – MDMA & GHB – get consumed in one scene.

17. Sex Erotic 3.4

18. Violence Fierce 1.6

19. Rudeness Salty 2.0

21. Reality

    Glib 1.4

    Urbane in the extreme, the film’s milieu is one of post-modern Western sexual relationships: commitment is rare, while beauty and power are treasured.

22. Circumstantial Surreal 2.1

23. Biological Natural 1.0

24. Physical Natural 1.0