REVIEW: “Broken Embraces” (***)

Mateo Blanco, the fictitious, sightless filmmaker who is both the ostensible hero of Pedro Almodóvar’s 17th feature film, “Broken Embraces,” and a highly refracted alter ego of Almodóvar himself, runs his career by one golden principle: “no sequels, remakes or biopics.”

This statement, hammered home to Blanco (Lluis Homar) by his long-serving agent Judit (Blanca Portillo), could be read as a cheeky allusion to Almodóvar’s own directorial philosophy. Arguably the most defiantly trademarked of all contemporary arthouse auteurs – even the casual cinephile can identify un film de Almodóvar by its palette alone – he is nonetheless surprisingly resistant to repetition.

As tempting as it may be for some to color his oeuvre with the same brush, there’s less common aesthetic ground between the jagged raunch of a “Kika,” the elegant humanism of a “Talk to Her,” or the icy genre play of a “Live Flesh,” than meets the eye, skewed black humor and extravagant visuals notwithstanding.

It’s not a case of phasal development either: the remarkable creative hot streak of his last five films saw him trying on a range of tonal and structural guises, unexpectedly becoming this generation’s crossover arthouse teddy-bear in the process.

So it is simultaneously a delight and a disappointment that “Broken Embraces” presents itself as the director’s most self-consciously Almodóvaresque effort to date, teeming with stylistic nudges to his previous work and winks directed at his longstanding fans.

Almodóvar himself has described the film as “a profession of (his) love for cinema,” and it’s true that the concentric narrative circles of “Broken Embraces” are richly steeped in a cornucopia of the director’s cinematic inspirations: Hitchcock here, Rossellini there, Sirk and Minnelli everywhere.

Still, the key creative touchstone of “Broken Embraces” remains Almodovar himself, as he meshes for the first time the florid melodrama of his ‘women’s pictures’ with the campy eroticism of his early work and the cool structural density of more male-driven titles like “Bad Education.”

So, if the warm, wispy “Volver” felt occasionally a little too calculatedly like a gentle access point for new converts, “Broken Embraces” therefore resembles the CliffsNotes primer for those needing to catch up on his entire career to date.

As primers go, it’s an informative, entertaining one, but the condensing of Almodóvar’s many creative moods into one handy text does come at the expense of genuine feeling.

It’s enormous fun spotting the numerous parallels and in-jokes that make the film something of a hall-of-mirrors walk through the director’s output, with a game cast of Almodóvar vets as our tour guide. (The references aren’t always particularly subtle: “Girls and Suitcases,” the film-within-a-film that becomes a key plot point in the third act, plays as an overt parody of the director’s breakthrough hit “Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown,” poisoned gazpacho and all.)

However, as the film settles into its patently enjoyable groove, it rapidly becomes apparent that – for all the dazzling self-reflexivity on display — this isn’t Almodóvar’s own “8½,” but an offhand lark whose complex framework of references disguises its lack of dramatic heft and thematic consequence. Unlike the intricately worked enigma of “Bad Education” and “Live Flesh,” “Broken Embraces” is a film noir whose multiple red herrings comprise rather than complicate its narrative.

To describe the plot in great detail is to spoil the pleasure of assembling and disassembling it in the cinema, growing as it does from both ends of a 16-year time span. In the present day, the aforementioned Blanco reflects on the making of “Girls and Suitcases,” the film that would ruin his career, prompted by the news of the death of the film’s producer, Ernesto Martel (Jose Luis Gomez).

A prominent, elderly businessman, Martel is goaded into funding the film by his mistress, aspiring actress Lena (Penelope Cruz), whose star-making vehicle the film is intended to be. But as Lena delights in her newfound professional success and forms a progressively intimate bond with her director, the jealous Martel takes ever more extreme measures to keep her under his thumb, with severe consequences for all involved.

It’s a splendid dramatic setup, with Almodóvar and editor Jose Salcedo taking a marvellously leisurely approach in joining the dots between characters and eras, but the director then interestingly reverses genre decorum by revealing the plot’s every question mark to have a simpler, more sober explanation than what we might have imagined.

Expectations of noir are thus fulfilled by structure rather than narrative, which makes the film fascinating as an anti-genre exercise, but leaves the oddly bemusing afterglow of a well-told shaggy-dog tale.

There are, happily, more than enough typical Almodóvar pleasures to compensate, from Alberto Iglesias’s alternately lavish and playful score to Sonia Grande’s immaculately selected costumes to the collective wit and zip of the ensemble, all performing with just the right amount of tongue in cheek for the proceedings.

Devotees of Penélope Cruz’s full-bodied characterization in “Volver” might be surprised to find her used in a cooler, more fetishized manner here: draped in a dizzying array of wigs and costumes, she subtly morphs in and out of fragmented interpretations of the director’s various female muses; it’s a performance that demands some knowledge of the director’s women and may therefore be an acquired taste, but the evident understanding shared by director and actress is a joy to watch.

A fresher, and no less exciting, collaboration is that between the director and hotshot Mexican DP Rodrigo Prieto who adds even more acidic saturation to the director’s ever-favored jewel tones while imposing a rigidly noir compositional sensibility that evokes both the Dayglo ominousness of “Leave Her to Heaven” and the more romantic shadow play of Bertolucci’s “The Spider’s Stratagem.”

It will be interesting to see if Almodóvar continues the partnership; this viewer hopes so, as it is Prieto who provides the newest, most individual notes of an otherwise rather ruminative, backward-looking film that is clearly the work of a contented master taking stock of his craft. “Broken Embraces” is a frequently beautiful summation of a brilliant career – but here’s hoping it clears the way for bolder experiments in his future.