Pedro Almodóvar has never been afraid of playing with timelines, and his ability to articulate how the past holds sway over the present infuses his work with a noir-like sensibility. Broken Embraces not only continues this exploration of guilt, and how it weighs on relationships, but also feels more personal than many of his other works.
The intricate story concerns a blind former film director named Mateo, who now goes by the name Harry Caine (Lluís Homar), the pseudonym he used on all his screenplays. Harry still makes his living as a screenwriter, and gets help in his day-to-day and business affairs from his loyal friend and longtime collaborator Judit (Blanca Portillo), as well as her son, Diego (Tamar Novas). One day, Harry learns that successful businessman Ernesto Martel (José Luis Gómez) has died. Not long after that, a young man named Ray X meets with Harry to pitch a script about a son who gets revenge on the memory of his father. Harry passes on the job offer, but quickly pieces together that Ray X is, in fact, Ernesto's son. This leads to Harry sharing with Diego the tragic story about his final movie, a shoot that grew complicated because of a love triangle between Harry, Ernesto (who produced the film), and Ernesto's mistress Lena (Penélope Cruz) that led to life-changing decisions for everyone involved.
The actual series of events that led to Harry's blindness are laid out with such fiendish ingeniousness that it would be unfair to spoil how adroitly Almodóvar handles his narrative. He cooks up a melodramatic tale that is equal parts Paul Auster meta-narrative and James M. Cain noir, but he stays clear of soap opera territory thanks in part to first-rate performances. Homar embodies an artist's restless desire to live life to the fullest, even when he can't see; Gómez could turn his antagonist into a moustache-twirling baddie, but instead he lets his intensity come out in frightening dead-eyed stares; and Cruz is able to be disarmingly sexy and in emotional turmoil at the same time -- something that has made her the key onscreen collaborator for Almodóvar throughout the second half of his career.
Almodóvar fills the movie with his typically gorgeous cinematography, and he's still unafraid to tackle highly emotional situations and characters -- like the flamboyantly gay son trying to win his father's approval -- without letting them devolve into camp. He's perfected a visual style that borrows equally from Douglas Sirk and Alfred Hitchcock, but he's synthesized them into a filmmaking approach that's entirely his own.
While this is all comfortably familiar for an Almodóvar film, what sets Broken Embraces apart from his other movies are the unavoidable biographical aspects. Not only is the hero a director, but he name-checks such classics as Peeping Tom, Louis Malle's Les Amants, and most tellingly, Fellini's 8 1/2. The modern Spanish master is doing more than paying simple lip service to the artists and works that inspire him; he makes Broken Embraces a statement about what drives him to continue making movies as he gets older.