You only live 24 hours every day

(Los abrazos rotos (Spain, 2009), a film by Almodovar, with: Penélope Cruz, Lluís Homar, Blanca Portillo, José Luis Gómez, Tamar Novas, Rubén Ochandiano)

Play it frame by frame, so that it lasts longer

Mateo Blanco, a writer and director who has lost his love, whose name was Magdalena (Lena), his sight and the sense of his identity in a car accident 14 years ago, finds catharsis in telling his story to Diego, the son of his faithful friend and producer, named Judit. Mateo’s confession is prompted by having met the son of Ernesto, the ‘monster’ who had tormented Lena with his jealousy and conspired to sink the movie in which she had been directed by Mateo. Ernesto had not only despised his son for being a little severely gay, but had also used him to spy on Mateo and Lena. Once Mateo has finished telling Diego his 14 years-old story, Judit pitches in and reveals that she had helped Ernesto to butcher Mateo and Lena’s film and might have indirectly caused their accident. All these events were shot as a film-of-the-film about the film-in-the-film, which had led to Lena’s downfall and now allows Mateo to find comfort. Paternity revelations, various chemo-viscero-epithelial indispositions (do our diseases or blemishes tell something about who we are? does the medical history of those we love shape our fates?) and other more or less random MacGuffins round up (spill out of?) the plot.

This simple, cheerful tale is just the background for a glorious meditation about storytelling. If in Trolosa Bergman was discovering his heroine little by little and listening to her capricious telling of her own story, allowing both of them to painstakingly grow before his eyes, Almodovar takes a more exhaustive approach: he throws everything into the pot at once – documenting every move of his characters, shooting the same scene over and over again, bagging jumbled fragments of old photographs, expressing every idea that goes through his head – then chooses the best takes and labours to put together the pieces until something coherent emerges. Choosing the worst takes may give rise to a monster, but as long as all the information is still available, any bad story can be rewritten and the reputation of the illusion restored. In Trolosa, the heroine and her story are pulled out of the song of an old musical box; here, it is an unexpected detail in a photograph, unnoticed by Mateo at the time when he shot it and generalised to a picture composed entirely of torn photos, that suggests the existence of a secret, and possibly even the blindness of the creator; then the story is moulded and scoured in the search of its original mystery. The closest a character comes to being autonomous, to having the freedom to describe herself, is Mateo’s fling at the beginning of the movie; for the rest, the director is the one who has supreme rights to describe both his life and the making of his movie, with the movie being just a subsidiary, cherished and lovingly polished but always kept under control. The characters themselves don’t seem to exist, they are just a collection of pieces glued together to fit some kind of higher purpose that doesn’t even seem to be the wholeness of the final story, but rather the discovering journey of the author. You have to finish a movie, even blind, concludes Mateo, and indeed Broken Embraces has the air of a blind groping for a final story. I’ve always wanted to be an actress, Lena says several times; it looks like what Almodovar does is to reverse the old compliment of describing a work of fiction as ‘life-like’; for him, the best way to live is ‘movie-like’, all stories tied up together from an original mess of facts, bad takes thrown away, unsightly blemishes airbrushed, life just a subsidiary of the perfect movie that can be composed with its pieces.

These uncomplicated, lazy musings also serve as a metaphor for the theme father-son. I don’t know the secret until I have written the story, says Mateo, and comparing his and Diego’s friendship with the relationship between Ernesto and his son, it looks like the right way to go is sons guiding their fathers instead of fathers shaping their sons. Has the secret come first, or the story? Does the writer create a film, or does the film shape his writer’s life? Are stories a celebration of life, or is life just a pool of happenings that are there for no other higher purpose than that they can inspire stories?

She’s too beautiful to be funny, is how Judit describes Lena. Is it by design that Broken Embraces is less funny than other films by Almodovar? Is it just carelessness that the acting is a bit stilted sometimes, the film a bit too long and stagnant in places, as if the takes used are not exactly the best, as if the editing was perhaps less accomplished than it could have been? The slight artificiality that sometimes precludes empathy, the cobbled up feeling, the sense that life is completely superseded and mined to the last drop of naturalness to provide inspiration for the main story and for its endless branches, the untypical-for-Almodovar air combined to new-takes-on-old-mannerisms, are these just artefacts, or adornments perfectly coordinated to the themes of the movie? Where exactly is the line between good and bad, between monster and genius?

Then of course one notices that Mateo is a writer, Caine an acquaired name that supplants/kills Mateo’s true identity, that Magdalena had worked as a prostitute after her first failed attempt at acting, that Judit dislikes Magdalena and possibly causes her death, that Diego is the son of a deserted woman (and of an unaware father), that the editor betrays the writer, that Caine is pronounced as Kane and (this one definitely a coincidence) Bergman’s character in Trolosa is played by Lena Endre, not to mention other cinematic references that could certainly be mentioned if I hadn’t missed them, and all that’s left to do is to forget about making sense of things and just sit back and enjoy the story and the breathtaking angles and colours and set design and images and Penelope Cruz at her best and the fantastic soundtrack, and be a little happier afterwards for having watched perhaps not the best of Almodovar’s movies, but still a movie by Almodovar, with all the sublime and absurdness evoked by this label.

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