Film noir with screwball elements
Almodóvar's latest film is shot in vibrant colours but the subject matter is dark, says Andrew M Brown

28 August 2009

Broken Embraces: a homage to Penélope Cruz

The Catholic Church must take some credit for Pedro Almodóvar's exuberant imagination, since the Salesians and the Franciscans educated him. His latest film, Broken Embraces, mingles film noir - a lethal love triangle, secrets, jealousy - with screwball elements in a

complicated but sturdy narrative that flits to the past and back to the present. With its vibrant colours and histrionic women it veers from realism into a sort of fantastical realm.

Almodóvar's films seem to be getting longer and he lets this one sprawl at more than two hours. Is it self-indulgent? Well, it is nostalgic. He ruminates about his past as a film-maker; the camera stares lovingly at whirring tape and other images that recall pre-digital editing techniques. His characters, when they're not writing or making films, are watching old ones. Still, there's plenty of the nitty-gritty of life for fans to ponder - infatuation, women, parents and children and, it must be said, ample helpings of guilt-free schtupping. Above all it serves as homage to the stupendous beauty of Penélope Cruz. In Broken Embraces she extends herself playing Lena, a femme fatale by accident more than design, since she's by nature guileless and vulnerable. What power she does exercise over men derives not from manipulation but from her disarming looks.

The 50-ish hero Mateo Blanco (Lluís Homar), also known as Harry Caine, is one of Almodóvar's damaged characters - in this case impaired by blindness, and the blindness has figurative implications too. Using the name Mateo Blanco he used to direct films. Then, 14 years ago, he lost his sight in a car crash on Lanzarote and now knocks out scripts under a jokey pseudonym, Harry Caine. He bounces ideas off Diego, son of his faithful producer, Judit (Blanca Portillo).

Harry's loss of sight has heightened his other senses. In the opening scene he seduces an eager blonde. Almodóvar approves of this sort of hedonistic fantasy. When Judit nearly walks in on them, we sense she, the plain friend, has suffered for her loyalty. Justifying his lechery, Harry says to her: "Everything has happened to me. All that's left is to enjoy life."

The story's dark heart is Harry's amour fou of 14 years ago. While Diego recuperates from an accident and Diego's mother is away, Harry relates the history to the boy. It involves Lena, an impoverished secretary. Her father is dying of cancer and so, needing money, she starts an affair with Ernesto Martel, her millionaire boss, an old goat whose cruelty is brilliantly rendered by José Luis Gómez.

Stifled by the old control freak, she secures a role in a film directed by Mateo/Harry. Almodóvar's casting Lena in this film-within-the-film ("Girls and Suitcases", a farce which, alluding to him again, rehashes Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown) allows him to reflect on his career and to visualise Lena as screen legends - in a nylon wig as Marilyn and, with hair swept up and quizzical face, as Audrey Hepburn. Mateo plunges into love with her. But they're doomed. Ernesto is viciously possessive.

The blackness of the film is in incidents such as when Martel pushes Lena down a flight of stairs. The actual colours, photographed by Rodrigo Prieto, remain the typical shiny Almodóvar shades - the colours of sweets or lipstick - apart from a symbolic detour to the volcanic island Lanzarote with its moody black beaches. Almodóvar tends to place unusual people in the foreground of his films, as he does here, which suggests his kind heart. Physical imperfection, morbidity, death, these all absorb him - plus, the spectre of a beautiful woman dying in a car crash haunts the story.

So to Mesrine: Public Enemy No 1, the second part of the four-hour Mesrine extravaganza. Vincent Cassel's face as Mesrine, which fills nearly every frame, is vivid in the memory from part one. It has puffed up, because Cassel gained four stone to portray the villain in the 1970s.

There are only so many variations possible: Mesrine does more armed robberies, even crossing the road after an assault on the Crédit Agricole to rob a second bank. He escapes more prisons. He kidnaps a millionaire whom he serves lapin chasseur. On the run with no cool accomplice to match Jeanne (Cécile de France) in part one, he sits around in his vest and quibbles with television reports of his crimes.

This part sees him consolidating his image as a revolutionary bandit and giving bombastic quotes to interviewers. Personally, he claims to be baffled, as we are, over his inability to act as a son to his dying father or a father to his ever-loyal daughter, whom he cruelly neglects.

Marco Beltrami has composed a gripping soundtrack, with the motif of a ticking clock that keeps in mind the countdown to Mesrine's blood-drenched end - machine-gunned in his BMW - at the hands of the police.

Ludivine Sagnier plays the gangster's last moll, Sylvia Jeanjacquot, as a horoscope-reading airhead. There's no one to balance Mesrine as Gérard Depardieu did. Francois Besse, the new partner, was an anxious introvert and Mathieu Amalric, who played the paraplegic writer in The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, is perfect in an uncongenial role.

Mesrine is pure murderousness. If he wasn't so dangerous, one might be tempted to laugh at him. The press called him "the man of a thousand faces" and for a while he tries the kind of beard you only see on garden gnomes.

Mesrine: Public Enemy No 1 is polished, but it loses some of the freshness of the first part, and the director has a lot of time on his hands, with the result that the climax is too painstaking. In the end, does Mesrine's story really merit four hours?