• Friday, November 20, 2009

• Country:

  USA

• Language:

  English

• Runtime:

  128 min

2009

In broken embraces a man writes, lives and loves in darkness. Fourteen years before, he was in a brutal car crash on the island of Lanzarote. In the accident, he not only lost his sight, he also lost Lena, the love of his life. In broken embraces Harry Caine act as a playful pseudonym with which he signs his literary works, stories and scripts, and Mateo Blanco, his real name, with which he lives and signs the film he directs. After the accident, Mateo Blanco reduces himself to his pseudonym, Harry Caine. If he can direct films he can only survive with the idea that Mateo Blanco died on Lanzarote with his beloved Lena.

In the present day, Harry Caine lives thanks to the scripts he writes and to the help he gets from his faithful former production manager, Judit Garca, and from Diego, her son, his secretary, typist and guide. In broken embraces harry act as  an active, attractive blind man  who has developed all his other senses in order to enjoy life, on a basis of irony and self-induced amnesia. He has erased from his biography any trace of his first identity, Mateo Blanco. One night Diego has an accident and Harry takes care of him (his mother, Judit, is out of Madrid and they decide not to tell her anything so as not to alarm her).

During the first nights of his convalescence, Diego asks him about the time when he answered to the name of Mateo Blanco, after a moment of astonishment Harry cant refuse and he tells Diego what happened fourteen years before with the idea of entertaining him, just as a father tells his little child a story so that he fall asleep.

Goofs

• Anachronisms: When the movie goes back to 1992, Ernesto Martel speaks from his office about getting a contract to build Caracas' Metro. This Metro was built more than 10 years earlier than that.
• Anachronisms: Mateo takes the photo of the couple on the beach using a Canon EOS5D camera. These were launched by Canon in 2005 - not in 1984 when he was at the beach with Lena.
• Anachronisms: At the end of the movie, during Matteo remakes the video, we see two chairs in old video record which are made by Spanish designer Patricia Urquiola for Italian furniture brand Moroso (Antibodi chaise lounge - produced in 2006). While Lena was going to open the door for red dress woman there behind we can see each of them. And also outside in the terrace we can see another chair designed by P. Urquiola for Moroso (Tropicalia chair - produced in 2009). But from 1990 to 1996 P. Urquiola was the assistant professor to Achille Castiglioni and Eugenio Bettinelli at the Politecnico Di Milano and ENSCI in Paris.
• Crew or equipment visible: After Ernesto pushed Lena on the staircase, he takes her to the hospital in his Rolls Royce. When they approach the metal gate of his Villa, you can see, almost in the middle of the frame, a blue square with a man inside, most probably a crew person.

Trivias

• In an interview with El País in March 2009, Pedro Almodóvar revealed that the idea for the lip reader played by Lola Dueñas came from watching the wedding of the Prince and Princess of Asturias on Spain's Telecinco, where the services of a lip reader were employed by the channel to relay what the couple were saying to each other as they stood at the altar.
• The roundabout where the main characters have a car accident is the same one where local artist César Manrique died years before in a car accident. César Manrique guided director Pedro Almodóvar in her first visit to Lanzarote, the island where the broken embraces was filmed. Almodóvar has said he was not aware of that fact, and that he found out about it from the news.
• CAMEO/DIRTRADE (Agustín Almodóvar): - Pedro Almodóvar's brother, and the film's producer of broken embraces appears as an employee of Ernesto Martel, in the scene where Lena returns from hospital in crutches. Agustín has cameos in 15 of the 17 films which Pedro Almodóvar has directed.
• The car driven by Lena and Harry Caine/MateoBlanco in Lanzarote is the same red car that is used in Volver (2006/I) and in the final scenes of Átame! (1990).
• The director of broken embraces revealed in an interview that the character played by Carmen Machi was inspired by his real-life friend, Blanca Sánchez, who, in the 1980s, had a relationship with a man who unbeknownst to her was a member of the Basque separatist group E.T.A. Sanchez was also used as the inspiration for the character Candela played by María Barranco in Pedro Almodóvar's breakthrough hit Mujeres al borde de un ataque de nervios (1988).

Quotes

• Terence McDonagh: His soul is still dancing.
• Deshaun 'Midget' Hackett: What for?
• Terence McDonagh: Shoot him again.

Awards

1. Golden Palm
   Event: Cannes Film Festival
   Result: Nominated
   Category:
   Recipient(s): Pedro Almodóvar
2. Audience Award
   Event: European Film Awards
   Result: Nominated
   Category:
   Recipient(s): Pedro Almodóvar