This review originally ran at Christianity Today Movies.

The sexual melodrama Broken Embraces is like an onion. But while it can be an enjoyable and even rewarding exercise peeling back all of Spanish director Pedro Almodóvar’s many layers, there still needs to be something edible when you’re through. Broken Embraces is, instead, a cornucopia of insightful ideas and a goodie bag of homages to other films, none of which find a way to cohere into anything articulate or meaningful. This, Almodóvar’s longest film, is also his least compelling.

Once upon a time, Mateo Blanco (Lluís Homar) was a famous director, beloved throughout his native Spain for his penetrating and absorbing films. Then he suffered a terrible car accident that left him completely blind. Out of the tragedy, Harry Caine was born, once a playful pseudonym the director used when evading the paparazzi, now an alternate persona within which to hide from the past. Though Harry’s mind was unharmed in the brutal crash, he is the victim of amnesia all the same, self-imposed though it may be. The memory of that unspeakable night is simply too wrenching to bear; Harry lost far more than his sight in the crumpled shell of steel and glass.

Harry still makes the most of life (and the beautiful women he encounters), and is a screenwriter thanks to the work that gets funneled his way from his former production assistant Judit (Blanca Portillo) and her son Diego (Tamar Novas), who transcribes his words. During one of their stints together, a series of events transpire that drive Diego to ask Harry about the time before the accident, 14 years earlier. To his astonishment, Harry relents and weaves a tale of jealous business tycoon Ernesto Martel (José Luis Gómez), his cuckolding mistress Lena (Penelope Cruz), his gay son (Rubén Ochandiano), and the one man who stumbled into their lives and bore witness to its absolute collapse: Mateo Blanco.

Films about filmmaking are usually deeply personal works for those making them and, like Icarus, often fly too close to the sun of narcissism. This is especially true in those films about directors (think Fellini’s 8 ½, Truffaut’s Day For Night or Allen’s Hollywood Ending), pieces of art that unmask both the creative life-force and the diffidence of the artist behind the camera. They almost always reveal more about the director than he intends to divulge. We hope for such a revelation in Broken Embraces, but it never comes.

Where is Almodóvar in all of this? Perhaps he is to be found in Harry/Mateo, a man who admits in the opening narration that, “I was always tempted by the thought of being someone else. Living one life wasn’t enough.” But the more we get to know Harry, we realize he is an avatar unfettered by Almodóvar’s spark. Who then?

For Almodóvar, muse and artist are one and find themselves embodied in the form of Penelope Cruz. When she is in front of the camera, she is nothing short of phosphorescent. We can tell Almodóvar is ravenously, almost fetishistically in love with her (and really, who on earth can blame him?). His compositions are worshipful and have a reverence usually reserved for medieval religious iconography. But it is a pedestal from which, once planted, she never steps down. When she is off-screen, so is he. As beautiful as Cruz genuinely is, we cannot gaze at her for two hours (much as we may wish we could) and call it a film. Though melodrama, an Almodóvar specialty, is identified by overwrought emotions, Broken Embraces can’t even muster that intrinsic passion.

There is certainly nothing whatsoever wrong with Almodóvar’s eye or his exquisite sense of balance, color and composition. Almost every richly textured shot in the film is a miniature lesson in aesthetics. Nor can anyone deny he has something intelligent to say — the nature of film, fathers and sons, the crafting of persona, the power of image, even the macabre irony of a blind man in the service of a visual medium — though it is a meaning that remains constantly in motion and therefore elusive.

Broken Embraces is a film within a film within a film, none of which are particularly moving, funny or effective. Throughout Broken Embraces we see characters not straight on, but reflected off other objects around them, warped imitations of the real thing. That is a good description of the film itself, an overlong, gorgeous looking but undeniably thin reflection of far better films in Almodóvar’s own canon. The affection and emotional sincerity of such films as Talk to Her, Volver and All About My Mother is missing here. While Almodóvar echoes many other voices — from Hepburn to Hitchcock, Rossellini to Bunuel — he never finds his own.

Almodóvar reveals himself here to be infatuated with appearances rather than internal beauty or motivations, an appropriate motif in a story about people assuming other identities, but hardly appropriate for the man directing them. We are forced to wonder if the characters’ skin-deep obsessions are not an intentional critique, but rather a manifestation of the director’s own misplaced fixations. If he cannot be bothered to find out what makes his characters tick, how can we?

© Copyright 2009 Brandon Fibbs. All rights reserved.