I know I’m supposed to love Pedro Almodovar, and I’m meant to have a man-crush on Penelope Cruth. But with Broken Embraces, honestly, I just can bring myself to. It is of course a beautifully made masterpiece of happy beginnings that implode erratically, of loves and jealousies and secrets and simmering Spanish passions in a film that is, typically, passion-less; here blind filmmaker Mateo Blanco revisits the story behind the loss of his sight, and his tangled love-triangle with an actress and a Chilean gazillionaire.
Yet even the Almodovar touch and the Cruth delivery can’t save it from being choppy, uneven and frankly a bit boring. Some of the “action” takes place on the black sands of Lanzarote.