| Director: | Pedro Almodovar | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Writer: | Pedro Almodovar | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Starring: | Penelope Cruz, Lluis Homar, Blanca Portilla, Rossy de Palma | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Released: | December 26, 2009 | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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| Runtime: | 128 minutes | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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| Story: |
"Broken Embraces" is a four-way tale of amour-fou, shot in the style of '50s
American film noir at its most hard-boiled, and will mix references to works like
Nicholas Ray's "In a Lonely Place" and Vincente Minnelli's "The Bad and the
Beautiful," with signature Almodovar themes such as Fate, the mystery of creation,
guilt, unscrupulous power, the eternal search of fathers for sons, and sons for fathers.
A man writes, lives and loves in darkness. Fourteen years before, he was in a brutal
car crash on the island of Lanzarote. In the accident, he not only lost his sight, he also
lost Lena, the love of his life.
This man uses two names: Harry Caine, a playful pseudonym with which he signs his literary works, stories and scripts, and Mateo Blanco, his real name, with which he lives and signs the film he directs. After the accident, Mateo Blanco reduces himself to his pseudonym, Harry Caine. If he can't direct films he can only survive with the idea that Mateo Blanco died on Lanzarote with his beloved Lena. In the present day, Harry Caine lives thanks to the scripts he writes and to the help he gets from his faithful former production manager, Judit Garcia, and from Diego, her son, his secretary, typist and guide. Since he decided to live and tell stories, Harry is an active, attractive blind man who has developed all his other senses in order to enjoy life, on a basis of irony and self- induced amnesia. He has erased from his biography any trace of his first identity, Mateo Blanco. One night Diego has an accident and Harry takes care of him (his mother, Judit, is out of Madrid and they decide not to tell her anything so as not to alarm her). During the first nights of his convalescence, Diego asks him about the time when he answered to the name of Mateo Blanco, after a moment of astonishment Harry can't refuse and he tells Diego what happened fourteen years before with the idea of entertaining him, just as a father tells his little child a story so that he'll fall asleep. The story of Mateo, Lena, Judit and Ernesto Martel is a story of "amour fou", dominated by fatality, jealously, the abuse of power, treachery and a guilt complex. A moving and terrible story, the most expressive image of which is the photo of two lovers embracing, torn into a thousand pieces. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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