3 Mulligans

Last night I was up until 4:30 in the morning watching Almodóvar’s Broken Embraces (2009). I hadn’t stayed up late with a movie like that in what seems like years and years. By the time I finished, I was wide awake and just wanted to stay up thinking about the movie, enjoying how it made me feel. To some extent, this is just another Almodóvar movie with by now very familiar themes: family, sex, illness, mothers and sons, and with the usual stable of actors. But even if his movies all bear an unmistakable stamp and don’t vary much, so what? For me, it works every time.

The plot of Broken Embraces, like most of Almodóvar’s movies, is interesting and original, but certainly takes a back seat to the storytelling itself and the dialogue and emotions of the actors. Here, a blind filmmaker recollects a pivotal time in his life when he vied for the love of a beautiful woman, fighting against the wrath and jealousy of a rich industrialist who has become obsessed with possessing her. In the hands of a Hollywood director, this story would be much different and would focus on the main character’s transformation. We would see lots of scenes of the filmmaker in agony, desperately unraveling spools of film and holding them up to his eyes searching in vain for an image. Then there would be a spiritual breakthrough and an inspiring montage of the filmmaker putting together his life’s masterpiece. But this is Almodóvar and we never see such scenes. The blindness is subdued, almost an afterthought. Instead, the movie starts with the filmmaker seducing a lovely woman he has just met on the street and we later learn that despite his blindness he is a successful screenwriter. More characters are introduced in both the present and in the past (as the main part of the movie unfolds in a recollection) until finally we see at the end of the movie how the two different timelines converge.

This is probably not Almodóvar’s best work and lacks the depth of emotion I felt in All About My Mother and the romance of Live Flesh. Loose plotlines at the end of the movie wrap up too neatly and suddenly for my taste. Still, even slightly rehashed Almodóvar leaves me feeling happy and awake — even at 4:30 in the morning.