Word: Boyd van Hoei

Nowadays, for art-house fetishists around the world, the name Almodóvar is almost like a holy mantra, guaranteed to provide a new grail of contemporary world cinema with each biannual offering. The Manchego director’s latest film, Broken Embraces, is both a continuation of his recent output as well as a throwback to his earlier work and a reflection on filmmaking and legacy in general (no wonder, considering the director turned 60 this year). Though Broken Embraces is either too long or too short to classify as a classical masterpiece — the film is so full of narrative twists that multiple viewings are almost a necessity to untangle the plot – his latest film does offer an insightful, if entirely self-styled, synthesis of the career of Spain’s most celebrated cineaste. And the fact it cannot be understood fully, at least not at once, is one of its core messages.

There is a reason why he is considered the Spanish director, as his films have marched in step with the country’s societal and cultural developments at large. Catapulted onto the international scene from the heart of the Movida Madrileña movement, which germinated after the death of Franco in 1975 and developed into the 1980s, Almodóvar’s early features were often hilarious, over-the-top melodramatic and willingly boundary-pushing and anarchic. They clearly reflected the director and the country’s coming to terms with a post-Franco Spain and the world at large.

But by the mid-1990s, Franco had been dead for twenty years, a new generation of Spaniards had grown up without any first-hand knowledge of his dictatorship, and the change in the fabric of Spanish society mirrored a growing maturity in Almodóvar’s films. The first seeds of change were clearly present in Flower of My Secret (1995), a transitional work, and came fully into bloom in Wild Flesh, in which the past was relegated to two bookmark scenes at the beginning and end of the film.

The tone of Wild Flesh is what marks it most clearly as the first of the second generation of Almodóvar’s films, which by now turned away from the need to rebel against conformity, and came to reflect a highly sophisticated interplay of cultural references from both the present and the past instead, resulting in a brand of heightened melodrama immediately recognisable as the director’s own.

For his latest film, the director reunites with actress Penélope Cruz, who has come to embody the second generation of Almodóvar’s films, starting, ironically, with a cameo in the bookends, set in the past, of Wild Flesh before her fleshed-out turns in All About My Mother, Volver and now Broken Embraces.

Cruz stars as Lena, a sometimes call-girl and wannabe actress who wants to star in Girls and Suitcases, a film not unlike Almodóvar’s output from the mid-1980s. Her looks attract the attention of the bankroller of the film, an older man, and also the director, who will be a blind man years later, unsatisfied with how the original film turned out.

Discovering how all these are connected in space and time is one the supreme joys of the Broken Embraces. Suffice it to say that there is a major role for the revengeful gay son of one of the characters, played with evident glee by Ruben Ochandiano in a performance without an ounce of vanity.

To ask whether Broken Embraces can be enjoyed without any previous knowledge of Almodóvar’s output is to misunderstand Almodóvar’s oeuvre altogether and this film in particular. Everything is connected, the director suggests, and the now shapes things as it moves into the future. It is this constant movement that makes it impossible to ever get a full view, but that shouldn’t keep anyone from enjoying the glimpses shown along the way. Perhaps Almodóvar suggests the past is never more current than when it directly influences the future.