Pedro Almodovar returns to the noir conventions of Bad Education with this serpentine thriller about a film director’s ill-fated affair with his leading lady.

Fans of the Spanish auteur’s work will find plenty to enjoy in Broken Embraces.

However, this new film lacks the wistful air of recent films such as Volver and All About My Mother, drawing inspiration instead from Roberto Rossellini’s Viaggio In Italia and Henry Hathaway’s Kiss Of Death.

There are flecks of Almodovar’s playfulness in a film-within-a-film entitled Girls And Suitcases, clearly a homage to his own 1988 film Women On The Verge Of A Nervous Breakdown, complete with a cameo for the one and only Rossy de Palma.

Yet the abiding mood is grim and foreboding, spiced with sexual jealousy, infidelity and brooding desire.

To counter these dark under-currents, Almodovar reunites with Oscar-winner Penelope Cruz, who lights up the screen as the sultry siren at the centre of the mystery.

After the opening credits, comprising two minutes of lead actors Cruz and Lluis Homar preparing for a scene, unaware they are being filmed, the movie opens in the company of scriptwriter Harry Caine (Lluis Homar), who lost his sight in a car crash on Lanzarote and subsequently changed his name from Mateo Blanco.

Aided by his good friend Judit (Blanca Portillo) and her typist son Diego (Tamar Novas), Harry has numbed himself to the anguish of the past – until news arrives that producer Ernesto Martel (Jose Luis Gomez) has died.

Harry is immediately transported back to the early 1990s and the set of his ill-fated comedy Girls And Suitcases, where he meets and falls under the spell of aspiring actress Lena (Cruz), who just happens to be Ernesto’s girlfriend.

As director and starlet embark on a secret affair, Ernesto becomes increasingly suspicious and he hires his socially awkward son Ray (Ruben Ochandiano) to spy on the couple under the auspices of making a behind-the-scenes documentary.

His worst fears confirmed, the wily producer sets in motion a chain of events that has devastating consequences for everyone involved.

Broken Embraces gives the brush-off to linear storytelling, ricocheting back and forth between the two timelines to orchestrate the high melodrama of the final reel.

Cruz is luminous as a woman at the mercy of her ‘amour fou’ (crazy love), and she sparks smouldering screen chemistry with Homar.

Ochandiano makes the skin crawl as the gay misfit with an unhealthy affection for Mateo, who observes of his admirer ‘You remind me of Peeping Tom.’ Almodovar’s screenplay shows flashes of his brilliance – ‘The last sensation she took from this world was the taste of your mouth’ – but for all its pleasures, Broken Embraces feels like a casual sidestep rather than a bold leap forward for such a talented film-maker.

• Release Date: Friday 28 August 2009
• Certificate: 15
• Runtime: 127mins

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