Culture Vulture: 11 reasons to see “Broken Embraces”

Director Pedro Almodovar and Penelope Cruz: Their new film probes the varieties of love.

By Helen Epstein

“Broken Embraces” at Kendall Square and Embassy Cinemas

1: Pedro Almodovar, one of the most interesting directorial sensibilities of our time, whose films probe our infinite varieties of experience in love and work

2: Penelope Cruz, an original who also incarnates the best of the many movie stars — American and European — who came before her

3: A meditation on forgiveness that draws, like Almodovar’s colors, on a full and many shaded palette of emotions

4: A multilayered and complicated story, involving a variety of characters whose class, age, and gender cover a wide spectrum of society

5: A Truffaut-evoking meditation on filmmaking, jealousy and revenge

6: A repertory company of skilled actors

7: Wonderful roles for women (as usual, not one or two but several great parts)

8: A fabulously seductive soundtrack

9: A striking tenderness in portraying difficult interpersonal transactions

10: A script so smart and a pace so swift that (unlike in a Bergman film, say) there is no time to read the subtitles and take in the visuals at once

11: A film you want to go back and see a second, perhaps third, time and still not be sure you grasped 90% of what you saw.

Helen Epstein’s essay on “Narrative in Memoir and Psychoanalysis” appears in this winter’s issue of “Psychoanalytical Perspectives” and in the newly published “Ecrire la Vie.