Word: brokenly
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...reason. The fundamentals are great, the experts tell us. Innovation is creating new opportunities and new wealth. We've gotten better at managing risk. After a few years of market trouble, though, the tone changes. "When the trend is sideways to down, they think the machine is broken," says Robert Prechter. "Jeez...
Often, before a movie scene is filmed, the director and cinematographer will bring in the leading actors' stand-ins to light and frame the shot. The opening image of Pedro Almodóvar's Broken Embraces shows this process with a stand-in for Penélope Cruz. Then the star actress enters the frame. She looks so somber, as if she's about to read a death sentence...
...first minutes of Broken Embraces announce the death of its star attraction, the actress Lena, played by Cruz. In the 14 years since her death, Lena has been deeply mourned by her lover Mateo (Lluís Homar), a movie director who was blinded in the same car crash that killed her. He now works under the playfully turbulent pseudonym Harry Caine, as in hurricane. He needed a new name, he says, because the real Mateo died with Lena. But now he learns of the death of Ernesto (José Luis Gómez), a wealthy businessman who financed Lena...
...Broken Embraces isn't one of the master's all-time greats (it's a notch or two below All About My Mother and Talk to Her), but it's still complex, vivacious and emotionally resonant. Since the gynocentric Mother and Volver, and the guy-nocentric Bad Education, Almodóvar has returned to the plot structure of the noirish Live Flesh: the toxic romantic geometry of a triangle love story. In the world of telenovela melodrama that has long appealed to Almodóvar, jealousy must be twisted into violence at the top of a winding staircase, while lust...
Star Quality Broken Embraces could be the title of nearly any Almodóvar film. His people are infirm creatures looking for a little hug that can be therapeutic or redemptive. The paraplegic cop played by Javier Bardem in Live Flesh doesn't shrug off sexual desire just because he's confined to a wheelchair. Almodóvar suffuses his new film with this notion of the crippled seeking help; nearly every plot point pivots on someone's infirmity. The message is clear: we are all invalids who want to walk, if the fates allow, into each other's arms...