AUTUMN MOVIE SPECIAL THE LOOK OF LOVE
A new film from Pedro Almodóvar has long been a cause for cineastic celebration and we kick our preview of the autmn’s best movies with a look at his newie Broken Embraces. Miles Fielder meets the man from La Mancha to talk over his 30-year career and relationship with muse Penelope Cruz 10 THE LIST 27 Aug–10 Sep 2009
P edro Almodóvar, the most famous Spanish filmmaker since his Aragónian idol Luis Buñuel, and one of the most acclaimed auteurs in international cinema, once described his relationship to his chosen medium of expression thus: ‘Cinema has become my life. I don’t mean a parallel world, I mean my life itself.’
Almodóvar has written and directed a film pretty much every second year since he made his feature debut back in 1980 at the age of 31 with Pepi, Luci, Bom (having learned his craft by knocking out 11 shorts between 1974 and 1978), so the 59-year-old has dedicated most of his adult life to cinema. But what Almodóvar was getting at with that comment is that cinema is has not only become his lifelong career, but it is by now also the overriding passion of his life. You can tell that by the way he makes his films, which are beautiful, erotic, outrageous, hilarious, labyrinthine and always consummately crafted. They’re labours of love. They’re also cine- literate, films about films loaded with erudite and/or cheeky references to other films and their makers. And Almodovar’s latest, the noirish romance Broken Embraces, is his most explicit love-letter to cinema yet. heartrending,
‘What I wanted to talk about in this film, this love story,’ Almodóvar says, ‘was the relationships between the four characters, and in some cases their fatal love affairs. It just so happens that these four characters are involved in making a film. And in a very natural way that film provides a backdrop for their story. Later, I realised that when I put my camera in front of the lights and the actors and the editing
table and filmed those things I was paying tribute to filmmaking itself, and to all these things that have been part of my life for a long time and without which my life would not be what it is.’ Broken Embraces is a story of amour fou involving a Madrid filmmaker Harry (Lluís Homar), his leading lady Lena (Penélope Cruz), her wealthy sugar daddy Ernesto (José Luis Gómez) and Harry’s assistant Judit (Blanco Portillo). The plot is driven by love and jealous passions that achieve critical mass during the making of a comic film titled Girls and Suitcases. Broken Embraces is punctuated with numerous film references (everything from Robeto Rossellini’s Viaggio in Italia to Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom) but Almodóvar goes a step further by remaking segments of his own film, Women on the Verge of A Nervous Breakdown, and turning his film- within-a-film into a piece of self-parody.
In doing so, Almodóvar says he wasn’t paying homage to his own work. ‘I decided they would be filming a comedy because it is the opposite genre to the drama the protagonists are living and so their problems would take on greater relevance,’ he says, ‘and I adapted my own material because I could do so with total freedom.’ However, partially remaking a film he shot 20 years ago neatly describes the arc of this filmmaker’s impressive oeuvre.
‘I never set out to be scandalous,’ Almodóvar says. ‘That’s what Lars von Trier does. I just wanted to tell my stories from my point of view, although I admit that sometimes my stories can be outrageous. But I’ve been