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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...
Almodóvar is cherished worldwide for his movies' brio and wisdom, but the Spanish writer-director, who turned 60 in September, has been preoccupied with death and mourning in many of his prime films. He killed off important characters in the first reels of All About My Mother and Volver, then examined how the survivors coped with their loss or the urge for revenge. An underlying love for the dead or near dead stokes the main figures in Talk to Her and Volver. In each case the grieving is natural, respectful, votive. Also volcanic...
...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's entrance into movies and whom Mateo blames for her death. For the next two hours, Almodóvar suavely juggles the events...
...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 collides...
Castro believes that Chávez's oil-fueled Bolivarian revolution (named for 19th century South American independence hero Simón Bolívar) discriminates against the middle class. When he recently applied for a mortgage to buy a new house in a safer neighborhood, he says he was offered an exorbitant interest rate, set largely by the government, because of his economic status. "I came out with the impression that they give priority to the lower strata," he says. It's admirable to boost the poor, who before Chávez were largely ignored by Venezuela...