Mateo Blanco (Lluís Homar) used to be a film director. In fact, back in1994, he was directing movies that bear more than a passing resemblance to the earlier films of Pedro Almodóvar, like Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown -- wild but character-driven comedies, walking the line between madcap and melodrama. Almodóvar's recent work, like Talk to Her, Volver, and now Broken Embraces, has veered towards more emotional, dramatic elements (though strong elements of comedy, camp, and noir remain).The career of Mateo, who happens to be the focal point of Broken Embraces, failed to evolve in the same direction, for reasons he is initially reluctant to disclose -- though obviously the accident that left him blind had something to do with it.

I refer to Mateo as the "focal point" rather than the "star" of the film because the latter is a difficult title to attain in an Almodóvar film that also features Penelope Cruz. When Cruz does strong work for American directors like Woody Allen, it's built on the foundation of what she's established with Almodóvar: a beguiling mix of toughness and glamour. Here she plays Lena, an actress in Mateo's Women on the Verge -esque movie and the wife of a powerful businessman (José Luis Gómez); simple moments, like Lena trying out modeling faces early in her career, turn lovely in the face of Almodóvar's attentiveness.

Though much of the story takes place on the set of Mateo's film in 1994, we first meet him in 2008, when he is blind and occasionally writing under the name Harry Caine. How he got from an on-set affair with Lena to a life of darkness and relative seclusion provides the film's dramatic and thematic engine; the cross-cutting between 1994 and 2008 creates a lot of handy doubling, as does the movie-within-a-movie.

But for all of his elegant homage, reflection, and beautiful treatment of Cruz, Almodóvar's actual storytelling gets a little hoary. Almodóvar's movies can be witty and emotional and off-kilter, yes, but even some of his most striking films have a formidably talky, expository side -- plots that explain themselves, less a meditation on how we tell our life stories than a clunky illustration of same. In Broken Embraces, Mateo's life stories tumble out in dialogue, like a deadpan soap opera. By the movie's final stretch, half the scenes seem to center around a character saying, "I need to tell you something." These revelations themselves are oddly predictable -- so unsurprising at times that you wonder if they're supposed to be some kind of twist on audience expectations for further complications.

Almodovar's comedy is sometimes just as clumsy, with side characters not as well-realized as Mateo or Lena. The gay son of Lena's husband figures into both timelines, and he's played by Rubén Ochandiano with a kind of stylized gawkiness straight out of a Jared Hess movie. Odd that such a gay-friendly director would make the one gay character in Broken Embraces so weak and close to caricature.

Still, there is pleasure in Broken Embraces; its lack of heft, its vaguely second-tier status, actually makes it easy to enjoy as a thin but involving melodrama. Visually, the film has lovely moments, as when Mateo's hand glances longingly over video frames, shown in close-up and slow-motion, like moving abstract paintings. Yes, it's another movie about movies, and not one that reflects film obsession through a prism of something more lyrical and profound. But it still sparkles, a little.

Aka Los abrazos rotos.



More blush.