CARMEN MACHI, PENELOPE CRUZ IN GIRLS AND SUITCASES, THE FILM WITHIN THE FILM BROKEN EMBRACES

Bright colors, shifting identities, and Penélope

Another campy plot from Almodóvar, this time shifting back and forth in time and identities. It's all about a blind movie director with a tragic past and a strong sex drive (Lluis Homar). That's what we see at first anyway. And he has a good-looking twenty-something son, Diego. The director's name? Harry Caine. But wait a minute. He's Spanish. And once upon a time his name was Mateo Blanco. Some flashbacks to fourteen years ago explain things. And there's a movie-within-a-movie, and a clash with a rich guy named Ernesto Martel (José Luis Gómez) whose wife (or was it mistress?) Lena becomes Mateo's lover, and who just happens to be Penélope Cruz. Artificiality abounds in this brightly-colored Almodovarian confection, which fans will love and others may view with indifference. People die and are reborn or change identities, and it's all fun, more or less, and gorgeous and shallow and rooted in a mix of genre plots of bygone decades, with references to Douglas Sirk and Jules Dassin, among others.There's the theme of "duplication" and a "noir" triangle, and a woman thrown down a marble staircase as in Leave Her to Heaven and Kiss of Death. And there are references to Minelli and Billy Wilder, Some Come Running and Breakfast at Tiffany's and Giuietta Massina and La Strada. We know all these are in there because Almodovar says so in the press notes -- though a page seems to be missing.

Martel's death starts the plot rolling, and Harry/s former production director Judit (Blanca Portillo), who will wear out her welcome later, seems very upset at this news. An aggressive gay guy turns up who calls himself Ray X (Ruben Ochandiano), who's really the late Ernesto Martel's son Ernesto Junior, asking Harry to help him make a movie of his life -- designed to get back at his dad (posthumously) for oppressing him. Later it turns out that earlier Ernesto was a Peeping Tom-like character with an Anton Chigurh haircut and pimply skin forced by his jealous dad to tail Harry, then Mateo, constantly at him with a video camera. And it seems Ernesto Senior was onto the fact that Lena wasn't just working for Mateo as star of his film, Girls and Suitcases (it sounds funnier in Spanish, Chicas y maletas) but was messing around with him, as a lip reader (Lola Duenas) revealed to the old man when he watched his son's surveillance videos.

Almódovar has a sense of humor. And since there's little magic here -- unless it's enchantment that's making you doze off -- it's those incidental moments of wild, pointless silliness that liven things up. For instance, it turns out that Harry, who, we eventually learn, changed his name from Mateo after a car accident that blinded him in 1992, has by the movie's beginning developed a scam of getting pretty girls to help him across the street, then inviting them up to his flat to read him the paper, and bedding them. In a NYFF Q&A, the director rather gleefully said this was his starting point for the whole film, and an idea he thought up during a period of convalescing from migraines. Toward the end, there's an early scene from a new, improved cut of Chicas y maletas with Penelope and a friend (Carmen Machi) talking about utterly silly stuff, and it's giddy fun. If only the movie was as good as the movie-within-the-movie! If only the movie-within-the-movie could be good for more than five minutes!

Almodóvar can be wildly emotional or giddy or funny, and he gets them all mixed up. This time the magic isn't there, the way it was (for me) in the strange Talk to Her/Habla con ella, and Broken Embraces lacks the really crazy wildness, as in Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown -- my favorite Almodóvar title: Mujeres al borde de un ataque de nervios. Wonderful!

This time as experts will tell you (and he will tell you too) there are a lot of Almodórar's favorite themes woven in (more fathers and sons than mothers and sons this time), and the mix of genres already mentioned, as well as many of his cast regulars, most of all his diminutive sexpot Ms. Cruz. Almodóvar is a New York Film Festival regular and it's fun to see him sitting next to Penelope on stage speaking half in English and half in Spanish, and having the Spanish translated by Lincoln Center Film Society Director Richard Peña. But on a day when we watched Michael Haneke's The White Ribbon, there wasn't much energy left for this relatively wan and routine (though bright-colored and elaborately plotted) Almodóvar creation. This is not to deny the technical accomplishment of the whole package, the delightful bright color, and Penélope Cruz's valiant effort to emerge as a credible character through an array of wigs and personalities. But Broken Embraces is stuff for the dyed-in-the-wool Almodóvar fan, not for the general audience even of art houses.

Sony Pictures Classics will distribute Los abrazos rotos in the US and it was shown as part of the New York Film Festival at Lincoln Center 2009. It was introduced at Cannes and has gotten excellent reviews in France -- sort of. Thomas Sotinel, Le Monde: "This recycling reflects a crisis of inspiration. But the advantage of a great creator over ordinary people is that he may even be inspired by the lack of inspiration, and style has not escaped along with new ideas."

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©Chris Knipp. Blog: http://chrisknipp.blogspot.com/.