Film Review: Broken Embraces
Saturday, 6 February 2010 03:46 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
daThursday night, d. and I went to see Almodóvar’s latest. I hadn't read many reviews, and none of the ones I read give away the... middle, but I think it's worth the reveal.
If you liked Women on the Verge, you should see this. There is a film-in-a-film which has a delightfully wrong homage - (there's a bed on fire; and barbiturates in the gazpacho; and... you just can't do that. Can you?) or as The New York Times review puts it:
"the director’s pastiche of his early, funny work becomes, in the context of this somber new film, a poignant reflection on aging and loss. To catch a glimpse of “Women” in the mirror of “Embraces” is to see how cinematic images can be both tangible and ghostly."
Much of the film is in flashback to 1992-1994, a full 14 years before the film's "present". [A self-indulgent side-note: I'm struck by how much happens in that 14 years- and it's a bit spooky to overlay the plot over top of my life, to see elements I would just consider "modern" in the 1994 shots and realize no, they were modern 14 years ago. Getting old here, folks.]
Things start with bright and cheerful casual relationships, a writer who changed his name and lost his eyesight, a close assistant and her son; in flashback, Almodóvar tells the back story of the principals, unspooling what might be a murder mystery. It can't be film noir if it's shot in bright primary colors, can it? But noirish it is; and fairly grim for a portion. Until Almodóvar upsets the apple-cart with the first glimpse of Women on the Verge. (In the theatre, dan and I were the only people who were laughing out loud. Which felt pretty damn weird!)
I will be thinking about this film for a while. It digests slowly. There are themes of piecing together ones past; re-editing a badly told story into something beautiful; recovering destroyed photographs from their shreds; reclaiming one's whole identity from pieces that had been buried and considered dead. An Almodóvar trope: self-reinvention and becoming more true to oneself.
Loss. Aging.
And beautiful images of Spain, which I haven't visited, and really would like to.
If you liked Women on the Verge, you should see this. There is a film-in-a-film which has a delightfully wrong homage - (there's a bed on fire; and barbiturates in the gazpacho; and... you just can't do that. Can you?) or as The New York Times review puts it:
"the director’s pastiche of his early, funny work becomes, in the context of this somber new film, a poignant reflection on aging and loss. To catch a glimpse of “Women” in the mirror of “Embraces” is to see how cinematic images can be both tangible and ghostly."
Much of the film is in flashback to 1992-1994, a full 14 years before the film's "present". [A self-indulgent side-note: I'm struck by how much happens in that 14 years- and it's a bit spooky to overlay the plot over top of my life, to see elements I would just consider "modern" in the 1994 shots and realize no, they were modern 14 years ago. Getting old here, folks.]
Things start with bright and cheerful casual relationships, a writer who changed his name and lost his eyesight, a close assistant and her son; in flashback, Almodóvar tells the back story of the principals, unspooling what might be a murder mystery. It can't be film noir if it's shot in bright primary colors, can it? But noirish it is; and fairly grim for a portion. Until Almodóvar upsets the apple-cart with the first glimpse of Women on the Verge. (In the theatre, dan and I were the only people who were laughing out loud. Which felt pretty damn weird!)
I will be thinking about this film for a while. It digests slowly. There are themes of piecing together ones past; re-editing a badly told story into something beautiful; recovering destroyed photographs from their shreds; reclaiming one's whole identity from pieces that had been buried and considered dead. An Almodóvar trope: self-reinvention and becoming more true to oneself.
Loss. Aging.
And beautiful images of Spain, which I haven't visited, and really would like to.
