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Trust Weighted
Great
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66Trust Points
Wick's Review
Summary - Great 4.0
Penélope Cruz plays the object of desire for two powerful men, a handsome filmmaker and a rapacious businessman, in Broken Embraces. Hmm, Pedro Almodóvar’s latest creation includes more than a little wish fulfillment, doesn’t it: He projects himself as the virile lover of his muse and conjures up a cliché capitalist as a craven destroyer of beauty.
Fortunately he does all this with consummate skill and a great Screen Queen at the movie’s center. So it’s more than worth seeing for fans of Euro cinema and/or Cruz. She’s mucho dynamic in her native Spanish.
Regarding that last: the dialog comes fast and furious. So be prepared to read the captions rápidamente.
Acting - Great 4.0
A true Queen of the Movies, Penélope Cruz is leggy and ravishing, lithe yet voluptuous, strong yet vulnerable. Here she plays an upstanding gal who resorts to prostitution, a Spanish Pretty Woman who puts Julia Roberts to shame. As if that’s not enough, she easily assumes an Audrey Hepburn look in Broken Embrace’s movie-within-a-movie. Bravo!
Lluís Homar, a longstanding star of the Spanish stage and screen, deftly plays her handsome paramour, Almodóvar’s alter ego. Square-jawed yet blind, he’s sufficiently charming to believably pick up a beautiful model half his age.
Spanish cover girl Kira Miró plays the model. Her verbal self-description – followed by a fairly explicit sex scene – nicely heats up the beginning of the movie.
The rest of the cast are generally strong as well.
- Rubén Ochandiano as a gay twerp.
- Blanca Portillo as an unrequited lover.
- Tamar Novas as her handsome club-going son.
- José Luis Gómez as a jealous tycoon.
Male Stars - Very Good 3.5
HomarFemale Stars - Really Great 4.5
CruzFemale Costars - Very Good 3.5
Blanca Portillo, Kira MiróMale Costars - Very Good 3.5
José Luis Gómez, Rubén Ochandiano, Tamar NovasFilm - Great 4.0
Well constructed if a bit over-wrought, Almodóvar’s ambitious story conjures Cruz as a kept woman who falls in love with a handsome auteur. This sort of self-referential aggrandizement brings to mind Fellini’s 8½ and Woody Allen’s Vicky Cristina Barcelona (also starring Penélope Cruz).
Direction - Really Great 4.5
Almodóvar brilliantly creates a movie within the movie, basing it on his own "Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown":http://www.viewguide.com/movies/371649. Calling it _Women and Suitcases_, he gives it a high gloss pop sensibility, drenching it in color, red especially: tears falling on tomatoes is one particularly scarlet image.Dialogue - Very Good 3.5
The melodrama around a movie director becomes a bit tiresome and more than a bit predictable by the final reel.Music - Very Good 3.5
Visuals - Very Good 3.5
Edge - Risqué 2.3
Great sex. Cruz gets ravished by middle-aged Lluís Homar, who also has a blind hookup with Kira Miró at the start of the movie. You go dandy.
An alphabet soup of club drugs – MDMA & GHB – get consumed in one scene.
Sex Erotic 3.4
Violence Fierce 1.6
Rudeness Salty 2.0
Reality - Glib 1.4
Urbane in the extreme, the film’s milieu is one of post-modern Western sexual relationships: commitment is rare, while beauty and power are treasured.