30 Nov Broken Embraces (2009)

Blind Onion

As usual, Pedro builds layer upon layer of introspective insight. As before we have love, image, image as love through the eyes of a filmmaker, love as obsession, obsessions of the filmmaker’s eye, and that imposed on the love discovered/portrayed.

This time the layering is more elaborate than in the past. This time, the film within is deeper and more overt, literally calling up Almodovar’s first successful film about tensed femininity.

The structure is delicate and watching hi weave it is a sublime experience.

You have Cruz, who lives in a film world. At night, she enters the role of Severine, where she becomes someone else, an actress drawing deep on her sexual core. (The reference to this whole part of her life is offscreen, inherited from a Bunuel film.) This ends disastrously, and she retreats to ordinary life, which is a brief launching pad of normality. This is where we start.

The trigger for folding the layers is a dying father. From thence we create a fold of Severine/Cruz/Lena as acting as a rich man’s lover, followed by her becoming an actual actress, Nurse Betty-wise. Here is where she encounters the filmmakers, whose films we see.

One is the film we are watching, presumably written by the son and derived from the initial idea he pitches: moral vampires who run bloodbanks, one of whom falls in love with someone who comes in. Another is the overt film-within, clearly “Women on the Verge.” But it is occluded by bad vision and needs to be properly seen. Within that is a “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” internal fantasy life, with Cruz adopting the Hepburn role, folded over onto the role she plays as mistress to a rich man.

A parallel film is a documentary of the making of the above film within, watched nightly as it is being shot by the rich man who stands here for the noir audience-manipulator. The film we are watching is unrolled to us in nested flashbacks: Harry (the primary Almodovar surrogate) telling the viewer the outer story, then telling his (unbeknownst to him) son.

That outer story has the filmmaker failing: making a bad film which kills his love and takes his sight, both literally. Or is it? We find that he is perhaps not blind and that the Severine/Cruz/Lena character is likely the woman who is his protector, enabler of his art (as producer) and mother of his child (about which he is also blind).

It sounds excessively nested and complex, blending Fellini, Bunuel, Medem, Antonioni, Greenaway and others. But as is Pedro’s gift, it all flows freely, the folds and nests blend under the guise of magical realism and seem natural. So this is a tedg filmsfolding.com wet dream, right? Well, no.

Pedro is going through a crisis. Well, another crisis. He can build the folds, the layers. He can elaborate, going over and over the script in the manner of Joyce making Finnegan and add yet more introspective and external vectors. He builds and builds. But he is Harry Caine, a hurricane of obsessive structure and touching of remote womanness.

And he is blind. This film has none of the cinematic beauty that makes his structures matter. It lacks the images that make life full, that make sex be part of love. He gives us a film about why he lacks this, why he is blind — including his gay distance from women.

So where “8 and a half” was this same sort of structure, but the tension in the folds produced profound, profoundly cinematic images on women, this is precisely the opposite: the images are not there. This filmmaker is not a filmmaker, but a blind screenwriter, hoping in his blindness to make a better “Women on the verge” by mining a newly found memory store.

Posted in 2010

Ted’s Evaluation — 4 of 3: Every cineliterate person should experience this.

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