Monthly Archives: December 2015

  • Broken Embraces

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Los abrazos rotos

    Pedro Almodóvar (2009)

    I saw Inglourious Basterds in the last week of August and Broken Embraces on the first day of September.  The two pictures, for all their differences, were immediately coupled in my mind because they display their creators’ cinephilia in such a very explicit way.  The Tarantino film angered me and I really enjoyed the Almodóvar one.  It’s taken ages to get my thoughts about it down on paper and I knew many weeks ago this was because I didn’t really have anything to write.  It took me long enough to do a note of Inglourious Basterds but I felt a pressure to do it that I never felt with Broken Embraces.  Three months on and the notes I scribbled the day I saw it remind me that I liked the film then.  But it’s virtually evaporated in the meantime, whereas parts of Tarantino’s picture (although it still angers me) have stayed strong.   Pedro Almodóvar nowadays directs with complete confidence yet, in terms of the strength of his themes and obsessions, he seems to be in decline.  He’s not old for a film-maker (sixty this year) but he doesn’t seem to have that much left to say.

    Broken Embraces is about the doomed love affair between a cinema writer-director and the woman who became a leading lady in one of his films.  In the present tense of the story, the man, Mateo Blanco, is now blind and has taken the name ‘Harry Caine’.  He shares his life with his loyal assistant, Judit, and her adult son, Diego.  The story moves backwards and outwards from its starting point.  Soon we’re in 1992 and watching a beautiful young woman called Lena, whose father is dying and whose mother is poor.  Lena is secretary to an immensely wealthy businessman, Ernesto Martel, but she has to supplement her income, in order to pay her father’s hospital bills, with part-time work as a prostitute.  Her life changes once she becomes Martel’s mistress.  She announces that she wants to become an actress and gets a part in a film Mateo is making.   The obsessively jealous and suspicious Martel has his creepy, effeminate son spy on Lena and Mateo with a camcorder.   Broken Embraces has plenty of plot:  Almodóvar has to do a lot of melodramatic writing to tie together the various strands of the story.  The contrivance is enjoyable as you’re watching the film, as is the heap of movie references.  Love of cinema and the extent to which films enrich characters’ fantasy lives and inform their real ones are familiar Almodóvar themes but in a picture like All About My Mother they’re an important part rather than the sum total of the people in the story.  Broken Embraces seems to be so completely about film-making that, even though it’s more dynamic than Almodóvar’s previous film Volver (2006), it ultimately lacks a life of its own.   (Although this obviously can’t apply in the same way to the title in Spanish, the fact that ‘Broken Embraces’ sounds more like a translation than a natural English form of words puts quotation marks round the film in a way that fits with its artificiality.)

    Of course there are rewards to be had from this.  Some are minor but affecting, like Mateo listing favourites in his collection of films and saying he can live with being blind provided he can still hear the voice of Jeanne Moreau.  (How much you get out of this will probably depend on the extent of overlap between Mateo’s favourites and your own.)  A few other sequences amount to something more.  One day when Mateo is out for a walk with him, Diego remarks on a ‘Give Blood’ poster and this sparks a rapid brainstorming between the two men to invent a screenplay based on blood-doning.  You get the sense that this is something that’s tickled and fired the imagination of Almodóvar himself on seeing a ‘Give Blood’ notice but it works really well: it’s funny as a virtual comedy sketch and it helps to realise a bond between Mateo and Diego.  It also pays off in the eventual revelation that they’re blood relatives:  Mateo is Diego’s father (a revelation which is also a good illustration of Almodóvar’s continuing ability to make a moment feel right even if, in storytelling terms, it’s obvious and mechanical).  I can’t help  taking pleasure in the happy ending of Broken Embraces, underlined by Mateo’s maxim that, ‘You always have to make another film.’  But there are irritations in cinema’s stranglehold on the proceedings too.   The picture that Mateo is making in which Lena stars is called ‘Girls and Suitcases’ and it’s a replica of Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown.  Since it never occurs to you that Mateo is the same kind of film-maker as his creator, this idea seems not just self-indulgent but lazy on Almodóvar’s part.

    Pedro Almodóvar has a marvellous ability to create images without pinning them down, without giving them a limiting meaning.  The colouring of the sets and the clothes are what you’ve come to expect and enjoy in his films.  I’m less sure, though, about the way he uses Penélope Cruz as Lena as part of the design.  When, for example, she puts on a blonde wig, Almodóvar seems to be turning Cruz into an artificially constructed image of a woman.  Cruz is a good enough actress to distract you from this most of the time but I was still occasionally uncomfortable watching her, or, at least, the way Almodóvar presents her.  (That wig almost turns her into a drag queen.)  You’ve come to expect the actresses to be the stars of an Almodóvar show; as well as Cruz, it’s good to see Blanca Portillo (although, as Judit, she’s saddled with more than her fair share of backstory exposition), Chus Lampreave (her role is too small, as usual) and Lola Dueñas again.   Lluís Homar, however, makes Mateo a stronger male character than has appeared in any Almodóvar picture since Talk to Her. He’s good not just at acting blind but at presenting a man who has deeply interiorised his past.  Tamar Novas is Diego, the monkish José Luis Gómez is Martel and Rubén Ochandiano plays his son, whose camera sees all (‘Ray X’).   The cinematographer is Rodrigo Prieto and the score, which has plenty of sinister wit, is by Alberto Iglesias.

    1 September 2009

  • Broadway Melody of 1938

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Roy Del Ruth (1937)

    I kept drifting in and out of a comfortable doze.  I sometimes wondered if I was dreaming even when I was awake, as the story moved between its two main strands – the preparations for a Broadway show and the fortunes of a racehorse called Stargazer.  According to the contemporary Variety review in the BFI programme note, this combination of plots was pretty hackneyed by the time Broadway Melody of 1938 appeared (the horse’s big race win at Saratoga finances the show).  It still seemed a bit surreal, though, right down to the closing shot of the cast – in effect their curtain call – with the romantic leads (the producer and his new star) holding either side of Stargazer’s bridle. Having a doze was comfortable because the film is both agreeable and largely uninspired:  you don’t worry about missing much if you lose consciousness for a bit.

    The cast includes Robert Taylor and Eleanor Powell in the leads, Robert Benchley, Buddy Ebsen, George Murphy, Charley Grapewin, and lots of people I didn’t know – Binnie Barnes, Billy Gilbert, Charles Igor Gorin, Helen Troy, Raymond Walburn et al.  There’s also – and this is what gives the film its historical interest – Sophie Tucker, as a theatrical boarding house owner, and Judy Garland, as her teenage daughter.  As a child, Garland had appeared in a number of movies as one of the Gumm Sisters and she was in two films – Pigskin Parade and a short called Every Sunday – the year before this one but Broadway Melody of 1938 provided her first significant role.   The Sophie Tucker character, who was once a star herself, is trying to get a big break for her daughter and that’s what this film delivered for Garland.  It includes her famous version of ‘You Made Me Love You (I Didn’t Want To Do It)’, sung to a photograph of Clark Gable.  It’s hard to get a sense of the impact she must have made at the time, although it’s easy to admire the detail of her characterisation, as well as the power of her voice.  I still didn’t find her enjoyable, though, except in a too brief dance sequence with Buddy Ebsen near the end.  He’s wonderful:  a graceful, physically relaxed clown – you see it right from the first sequence when, getting a shave in a barber’s shop, he’s more and more nervous as the ‘Toreador’-singing young barber (who’s also keen to be in show business) works the razor on a strop with alarming gusto.  (According to Wikipedia, Ebsen was cast as the Tinman in The Wizard of Oz but had to drop out because he developed an allergy to the make-up.)  Ebsen is just as funny when he becomes Stargazer’s beanpole jockey, and stealing grain for the horse from a farmer (Grapewin).   Sophie Tucker’s legendary risqué personality is under wraps here:  even so, it was remarkable not only to see her but also to hear her do ‘Some of These Days’ (the song and the singer that cheer up Antoine de Roquentin in La Nausée).

    The theatrical boarding house is a good pretext for incorporating some variety turns offstage, although a little of a specialty sneezer (Robert Wildhack) went a long way with me.  Willie Howard is pretty hard work too, as a Russian artiste who waits at table at the boarding house, although his retinue of trained dogs are funny when they interrupt the boarders’ supper. The best and best-known songs here aren’t the ones that Nacio Herb Brown and Arthur Freed wrote for the film and the final numbers, at the first night of the Broadway show, are an anti-climax.  Eleanor Powell – as a racehorse trainer turned hoofer – supplies the bridge between the racecourse and the Great White Way.  Powell is an athletically brilliant tap dancer but, maybe because she seems an impersonal actress, that quality is transmitted to her dancing too.  I liked her comic-romantic dance duet in a park, with George Murphy, better than any of her more spectacular turns.  The rehearsals don’t have the show-must-go-on-if-it-kills-me power of what I think of as the echt Broadway movies of the 1930s.  That lack of energy is reflected in the person of Robert Taylor, pleasant but far from driven as the producer.

    29 October 2011

     

     

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