Penelope Cruz is a treat for the eyes, and so is her latest film, Pedro Almodovar’s sizzlingly sexy film noir “Broken Embraces,” a love
letter to the magical power of movies to mend broken hearts.
Like the hero of Alfred Hitchcock’s “Vertigo,” one of Almodovar’s many inspirations, this time out, Harry Caine (Lluis Homar) is a shattered man who is afforded an unusual second chance at recapturing a lost love.
Harry is a movie director and writer who has used only his writing pseudonym since an automobile accident 14 years earlier deprived him of his sight and Lena (Cruz), the gorgeous actress he was deeply involved with at the time.
One day Harry is approached by a young man calling himself Ray X (Ruben Ochandiano) who wants Harry to work with him on a film about his abusive father.
Harry instantly recognizes Ray’s voice as the formerly closeted gay son of Ernesto (Jose Luis Gomez), a diminutive, elderly and recently deceased billionaire who financed, and ultimately sabotaged, Harry’s final film.
The film starred Lena.
Unfortunately for Harry, she was also the mistress of the insanely jealous Ernesto, who forced his son to spy on the couple by shooting a “making-of” documentary (the scenes in which the old man employs a lip-reader to decipher the silent footage are wonderful).
The other major characters in the labyrinthine plot are Harry’s romantically frustrated longtime production manager Judith (Blanca Portillo) and Judith’s ambiguously fathered deejay teenage son Diego (Tamar Novas).
The latter is writing a script for a vampire movie that sounds a whole lot wittier than “Twilight” with Harry.
When Diego suffers an accidental drug overdose while his mother is out of town, Harry takes him in and recounts the troubled history of his last film, “Girls With Suitcases.”
This turns out to be a barely disguised version of Almodovar’s own early comic classic “Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown.”
Almodovar offers lots of homages to other movies, most notably the noir gems Henry Hathaway’s “Kiss of Death” and John M. Stahl’s “Leave Her to Heaven,” as well as a scene centering on a clip from Roberto Rossellini’s “Voyage to Italy.”
Cruz, who once again does her best work for Almodovar, grounds all this movie love with the emotional reality of a woman desperately trying to escape her controlling older lover, who incidentally bears more than a slight resemblance to a recently re-elected mayor of New York City.
You could complain this film — sort of a companion piece to Almodovar’s equally movie-mad noir “Bad Education” — is a step down from his last film, the near-perfect “Volver.”
That still makes “Broken Embraces” superior to at least 99 percent of the movies released in 2009. Run, don’t walk.