Day 7 kicked off with Pedro Almodovar’s Broken Embraces, a multilayered melodrama that dramatizes reclaiming traumatic memories and revealing painful secrets. Performances by Almodovar stars Penelope Cruz, Blanca Portillo and Luis Homar bring life and, occasionally, poignancy to the story of blind film director Mateo Blanco who writes under the pseudonym Harry Caine. Fourteen years before, Mateo survived a car crash while his lover Lena did not. Cutting back and forth between contemporary Madrid and the past, the tale establishes the fact that Mateo has abandoned his identity as a director. Living and writing now only as Harry Caine, he reaches a crossroads, finally able to relate to his assistant his regrets and anguish. As Caine grapples with events leading up to the fatal accident, the rich and possessive Ernesto Martel struggles to keep and intimidate Lena who finds fulfillment acting in film and in the arms of Mateo.

What differentiates the complicated Broken Embraces from lesser fare is Almodovar’s focus on the impact of events rather than on suspense surrounding what will happen next. This strategy lifts the film from concern with superficial soap opera machinations to serious consideration of the lingering consequences of events. Further, the juxtapositions between characters in a movie being made within this movie tease us with ideas about fantasy versus real lives. Further playing self-referentially with expectations, Mateo shoots scenes taken directly from Almodovar’s Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, here called Girls and Suitcases, with Cruz in the central role.

Almodovar expertly segues from the comedy of the interior film to the drama of the framework story in a tour de force balancing act. Almodovar’s directions to his actors help the film immensely. He told them that no matter how mad or exaggerated the material, perform in a totally natural, realistic way.

Broken Embraces doesn’t rise to the level of the best of Almodovar’s work, though its entertaining, lively and lovely surface often belies the serious content: encouragement to revisit and own our memories, however painful, and move on with life. If this were not sufficiently important, at the press conference, Almodovar extended his reach, saying he fully intended Broken Embraces as a metaphor for present day Spain which enjoys, in his words, “now for thirty years an adult democracy. The time has come to remember the past and know that it is indispensible personally and nationally to confront our ghosts.” He’s put his heart and soul into showing us the way.

Director Pedro Almodovar with actors Penelope Cruz and Luis Homar

Diane Carson, a freelance writer from St. Louis, has reviewed and taught film for over two decades. She’s covering the 2009 Cannes Film Festival for STLtoday.com.