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To compare Tarantino’s “Inglorious Basterds” to Pedro Almodóvar’s new film, “Broken Embraces” may raise a few eyebrows. “Basterds,” one hand, is a bloody, tense, World War II revisionist phantasmagoria, and “Embraces” is a touching, satiric melodrama which jumps back and forth between the mid-1990’s and 2008. But on the other hand, both live in worlds where men and women are defined by cinema, one in which film is a living, breathing entity, and if necessary film can be used as a weapon

Like a well-crafted novel, Pedro Almodovar’s “Broken Embraces” takes its time revealing its true intentions. It’s an emotional time bomb, one packed with passion, color, romance and tragedy.
Set alternately in the present and the early 1990s, “Broken Embraces” ostensibly is about a blind screenwriter named Harry Caine (Lluis Homar). First seen enjoying a sexual fling with a young woman he’s just met, Harry is obviously in demand as a writer. His agent Judit (Blanca Portillo) is pressuring him to finish an overdue script, so he can get to work on his next one

Harry Caine (Lluis Homar, “Bad Education”) is a blind screenwriter and former director whose real name, which he abandoned after losing his sight in a car crash, is Mateo Blanco. News arrives of the death of corrupt stockbroker Ernesto Martel (Jose Luis Gomez), who once produced a movie Blanco directed, “Girls and Suitcases.”

Blanco’s former production manager, Judit (Blanca Portillo), who holds a candle for him, seems nervous at the news. And then a pretentious young man calling himself Ray X (Ruben Ochandiano), who turns out to be Martel’s son, asks Blanco to help write a script that’s intended as an act of vengeance against his neglectful father.

The film now flashes back to 1992, when Martel fell for his secretary, a wannabe actress-cum-part-time call girl, Lena (Penelope Cruz). By 1994, he and Lena are an item. However, when Lena auditions for “Girls and Suitcases,” Blanco also falls for her.

Chagrined, Martel gets his son (also Ochandiano, here as a wildly gauche, camp teenager) to spy on Blanco and Lena under the guise of making a docu about the shoot. Watching Martel’s life fall apart, as a lip reader (Lola Duenas) decodes Lena and Blanco’s conversations in the boy’s footage, is hilarious. But any compassion for Martel evaporates in the laughter — one of several moments when the film deliberately undermines a particular mood.

Following a disastrous trip to Ibiza, Martel and Lena break up, and Martel initiates a slow, costly revenge designed to destroy Blanco. Hereon, much of the action takes place amid the volcanic landscapes of Lanzarote, opening things visually even as the drama becomes more and more claustrophobic.

Script moves fluidly back and forth in time, with superb editing by regular Jose Salcedo, and some of the witty, pointed dialogue is among Almodovar’s best. The labyrinthine plot is thick with twists, turns and resonances. But a couple of questions linger — especially that the revelations in the final reel would hardly have remained under wraps for 14 years, given Blanco’s suspicions.

Cruz delivers a compelling, subtle perf as a woman continually aware that the shadow of tragedy hovers over her. But because her character is effectively split into three — Magdalena the grieving daughter, Lena the actress and lover, and Pina in “Girls and Suitcases” — auds will struggle to locate an emotional center behind the thesp’s dizzying range of costumes and wigs.

While some of Almodóvar’s films are out-and-out heartbreakers – perfect storms of melodrama, storytelling and extreme living – this is a more cerebral, self-reflective and noir-ish affair. It’s part of his brilliance to tell wild stories without you even batting an eyelid. But here you can’t help notice the film’s complexity, not least because this tragic romantic thriller is mostly about films and filmmaking: Almodóvar is intent on piling image upon image so that there are several films within a film, including an amusing pastiche of the director’s own ‘Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown’, here renamed ‘Girls and Suitcases’

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