Sealed somewhere inside the careful thematic scaffolding and deliberate, searching narrative excavation of Pedro Almodovar's 25th film is a more creaturely pulse. Its presence is felt throughout Broken Embraces -- and note that title, like something pulled from Sirk's cold storage -- but only to the point of teasing suggestion, a faint thumping that can't quite pump life into the film's various and extenuated limbs, much less reach Almodovar's signature throb. Even beautifully executed, formally flawless constraint does not quite suit him, and the question is not why he locked his heart so deeply inside this mildly disappointing film -- it is as clear an emblem of his personal and cinematic passions as any film he has made -- but how he managed to, with not only all of his old faithfuls on hand but one character literally dressed up in his clothes.
Of late, chief among those faithful is Penelope Cruz, the star and spiritual center of his last film, Volver. Almodovar's interest in Cruz not just as aesthetic object but an old, slightly eccentric soul came to a splendid fruition in Volver; often with a pinnacle, however, there follows a diminishing return, a natural progression this film does nothing to avert. Here Cruz plays Lena (Magdalena), a woman of humble origins working as a call girl/secretary and at pains to support her parents through her father's grave illness. Having successfully guided the actress in the role of a complex, fully realized woman in Volver (a feat that had proved elusive certainly to Cruz's American directors before that time), Lena feels like something of a backslide for the duo. Here we have Cruz as glorious surface, again and nearly only; she exists in the film almost exclusively in memory or recorded image, and offers not much more than is required of her as a remote, recovered ideal. Lena takes up with her boss, Ernesto Martel (Jose Luis Gomez) because he is entranced by her beauty, and he takes care of her every need. Later, the director Mateo Blanco (Lluis Homar) falls in love with her at first sight, obviously, because she's Penelope Cruz. Why she returns the favor (Homar reads bland and underslept in the film's central role) remains in considerable doubt.
But I've jumped ahead, which is to say back, by 15 or so years. Embraces opens (following a shadowy titles sequence in which the couple are seen sharing the frame of a control camera on a film set) with Mateo in the present day. He appears to be blind, although his introduction -- in which he beds the lovely woman (how did he know she was lovely?) who offers to walk him to his door -- suggests a ruse. The director sets up a number of questions about who's who and what's what over the course of the ensuing scene, in which Mateo, who now goes by the name Harry Caine and is working as a screenwriter, takes a meeting with a pugnacious young man who calls himself Ray X (and who is actually Martel Junior, played by Ruben Ochandiano). As Mateo's agent (Blanco Portillo) and her son (Tamar Novas) look on, Ray X (even more comically odious as a teenager in the ensuing flashbacks) pitches a roman a clef about his recently deceased, tyrannical father. With that, we head back in time to trace the love triangle that wound up robbing Mateo of both Lena and his sight.
Spliced throughout a film in which all of the characters express and define themselves, one way or another, through film, are Almodovar's references to Rossellini, Bunuel, Noir, Hitchcock, Monroe, Hepburn, and ultimately himself. The basic plotline parallels to Bad Education are far outdone by one of Embraces's several films within the film: When Lena, bored with her cosseted life as a high class mistress, decides that she wants to become an actress, Ernesto finances Mateo Blanco's film, which happens to be a sparkling reproduction of Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown called Girls and Suitcases. Mostly we see the film in production, a backdrop to the love triangle developing between Lena, Mateo, and her bridling old man (who commissions his creepy son to shoot a fake making-of documentary, so that he can keep an eye on the couple), but toward the end we are treated to a full scene, as the film is resurrected from a desecrated print. Pedro on Pedro has an appropriately manic, outrageous bent, and Cruz and Carmen Machi doing a kind of Almodovar drag provides some of the film's only light moments: the director has joined his broken characters, as if he too seeks to understand himself and his past by doubling himself on film.
While there is a certain heady pleasure in watching Almodovar flex so many formal muscles, the overall effect is more of a flawlessly cut pose-off than an emotionally engaging experience. Characters are maneuvered rather than motivated, and we are ultimately prepped for a meta-noir swoon despite feeling no connection to the players or their busted lives. I suspect that the elaborately intertwined themes of display, doubling, and identity are meant to detach rather than embrace, inserting one more layer of celluloid between the story and the story's refraction on film. Ironically, I also suspect -- particularly for a director whose greatness is often correlated to his greatest, messiest risks -- that such a finely calibrated deconstruction (which Almodovar, writing his own press notes, took nine single-spaced pages to describe) of the convergences of filmed fiction and remembered reality might actually work better on paper.