Broken Embraces (Los abrazos rotos)
Oscar-winning director Pedro Almodovar's latest film drops his distinctive comic melodrama to shoot in the style of '50s American film noir. Broken Embraces centres on a quartet of characters in the movie business whose lives intertwine in a torrid tale of love, secrecy, betrayal and retribution. Mateo Blanco (Lluis Homar) was a famous director until a car crash left him blind and now makes his living writing scripts under the pseudonym Harry Caine. When news breaks that Ernesto Martel (Jose Luis Gomez), the corrupt official who financed his last movie (a calamity called Girls and Suitcases), has died, it awakens forgotten memories in Blanco of that ill-fated production. Broken Embraces then flashes back to 1992 where Blanco and Girls and Suitcases's leading lady, and Martel's mistress, Lena (Penelope Cruz) fall passionately in love.



