"Films have to be finished," intones Mateo, the blind former filmmaker. "Even if you do it blindly."
Thus does Pedro Almodóvar excuse himself from not quite being at his best with his 17th film, Broken Embraces (Los abrazos rotos). The Spanish filmmaker famed for personal, lurid and over-the-top comedies and dramas settles for straight, dull melodrama this time out. Broken Embraces is as starved of wit and pathos as the film it references, Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, overflowed with those virtues.
Mateo (Lluís Homar) used to be a moviemaker. He has been writing scripts as "Harry Caine" for years, ever since he lost his sight. "I became my pseudonym," he narrates, bouncing ideas off Diego (Tamar Novas), the son of his longtime production manager, Judit (Blanca Portillo).
A newspaper obituary and a visit from a would-be collaborator stirs memories of when Harry was Mateo, in love with aspiring actress Lena (Penélope Cruz), who risked all by cheating on her rich, powerful and much older lover to make a film comedy with Mateo, and make love to him as she did.
The story bounces from the present, when Harry/Mateo copes with his lack of sight and pieces together what happened way back when, and 1994, when Mateo put Lena in his movie and when the rich man's son followed her on the set, with a camera, spying on her for the old man.
One great touch: The footage the kid shoots is silent, so wealthy Ernesto (José Luis Gómez) hires a lip-reader to interpret what Lena and Mateo are whispering. The obsessed old man watches Lena slip away while an interpreter translates. Ernesto doesn't take this lying down, and that's where the movie spirals into predictable melodrama.
The movie is production-designed to death, and the sex scenes, another Almodóvar specialty, are novel and arresting.
Mateo works extra hard to give Lena her big break. But one failing in the film is how boring it is to watch Cruz pretend to be a bad actress. The comic movie within a movie, which borrows from Women on the Verge, isn't funny.
Contrived incidents take over the picture long before Mateo, at the editing table, declares that a film has to be finished. In this case, it didn't.
