THINQon : Broken Embraces

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George Browning, I like to play the flute.

Broken Embraces

Latest Post: January 24, 2010 at 3:35 PM

14 followers

Almodovar’s new movie, Broken Embraces (or Broken Hugs), is a beautiful movie. Besides the beautiful images, the beautiful woman (Penelope Cruz), the great acting, and the very physical aspect of the film (a great first scene), it is also very smart.

Instead of putting all the pieces together I thought I’d start a conversation on it, for people who’ve seen it.

Spoiler Alert – From here on up the assumption is that you’ve seen the film.

Needing money and deciding to return to being a hooker, she understands/decides that if to be a whore she prefers to be a very high paid one:

But the red, in which she'll often appear with, will come back and this time for real:

I’d like to note, for discussion and in case you didn’t notice, the major topic of the eye:

The film’s first image is an eye – I think of Cruz.

The main character lost his eyesight with the loss of Cruz.

The son, the rich guy son, is the eye of the father, his camera constantly a replacement for the father’s eye. Dave Robinson – if you saw the movie, I assume you’ll have something to say about that.

The earrings on Cruz :

With this comes the relation of sight and sound with the lip-reader and the reader from the first scene, etc.

Another topic which is entangled with this one is acting, and more precisely screen personas. Cruz is made to look like Audrey Hephburn, and like Maryline Monroe, above (I guess, or some other Platinum blond bombshell whose name I can’t remember).

As you can see, my thoughts are still in a mess. Like the torn pictures in the bag they find in the hotel room, it would be nice to put them together. Or at least one of them. (Who by the way tore them? The obsessed husband?)

This post is referenced by the following other contributors:

Margaret Wells

in "Post coitum omne animal triste - After sex every animal is sad"

(Bedroom)

Reply to:

Edna Stern

June 8, 2009 at 3:53 PM

87 followers

Hi George,

Beautiful movie. The picture where she is covered with all those chains reveals the choice she’s made in her life, to be literally enchained by money. Her reasons are wrong but nevertheless understandable: trying to save her father, giving her mother a feeling of security, and as you say if need to be a hooker, then better be a high paid one. She could live like that for sometime, until she got intimate with art. Martel’s first attempt to destroy Lena and her life is through the destruction of the movie, the destruction of hers and Mateo’s art. I guess that’s the point to which I was especially sensitive and found was so powerfully shown in this movie - the destruction of art’s life and subsequently of the people who created it.

I couldn’t help thinking on how similar is the making of a movie and that of a CD (though naturally, a CD is much less complicated and has obviously much fewer parameters to control). In both cases you need to choose the right takes, and the right pieces, or as Mateo says at the end “it is all false.”

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Misia Stone

June 18, 2009 at 10:23 PM

8 followers

George, to add to your thoughts about the significance of eyes/sight - I was wondering whether the choice of Lanzarote as a place for Mateo and Lena to escape from Martel was loaded in that direction. All those rock-rimmed volcanic craters reminded me of eyes, as if the landscape itself was watching them and the illusion of safety from the prying eyes of Martel (and the surrogate 'eye' of his son) was just that, an illusion.

I'm fairly sure it was Ernesto Martel Sr who tore up the photos. Who else could have (or would have) done it?

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George Browning, I like to play the flute.

June 20, 2009 at 7:18 PM

14 followers

Hi Edna, Misia,

Misia, I now agree it was Ernesto Martel Sr, as I just got that this is what he does to the film also - he cuts it out of its order. He put stogether the wrong parts. When at the end of the movie the Mateo's son tries to put the pieces together it is also putting the film back together again, as all of their lives which were somewhat taken apart by Martel Sr. And this is also the movement of the film, Broken Embraces, itself. Putting the pieces of the past back together to a comprehensible plot.
Broken Embraces - the breaking of a unity.

Edna, I like the similarity with making a CD. Also there it seems to me it is crucial to find the right producers and people to work with so as to get the best possible result. And the destruction of a CD seems so easy.