I am often asked which films turned me on to cinema. It’s hard to to determine the exact tipping point, but I think I became a die-hard cinephile, a true stickler-of-the-celluloid when I was taking an afternoon French class at the Alliance Francaise. They were doing a retrospective of Sacha Guitry films all summer and after class I would stick around the quartier waiting for the film to begin, perhaps going to Fauchon (which — dégueulasse! — no longer exists) or Central Park in between. I would then join the thirty-odd senior citizens and show my membership carte for free entry, and was subsequently sucked into his Guitry’s entire oeuvre. (Whether or not you *believe* in auteurism, there is nothing like the experience of finding an director that you truly appreciate to usher you into the art of cinema via his or her unique vision.) Guitry did it for me and I was hooked.
Jacqueline Delubac and Sacha Guitry in Quadrille.
What did I love about these films? I think it was a combination of the joy of being able to follow a good part of the French (for these actors, unlike their New Wave successors, had excellent elocution) and an overall playfulness with words that I regarded as the height of sophistication. I recognized Guitry’s films as mannered and artificial and I loved the stylization of reality — the wit, the unbelievable conceits, the unflappable comic arrogance of Mr. Guitry himself. I adored Jacqueline Delubac and Raimu and Fréhel, eccentric stars that to me could only thrive in French films. There is a scene in Les Perles de la Couronne in which Jacqueline Delubac is forbidden to speak in anything but adverbs because her husband suspects her of flirting with another man. Let’s just say his attempts to limit her communicative powers are in vain, and there isn’t a soul who has used a single part of speech more suggestively, ever. (Good grammar is sexy, folks. Well, at least to me.)
Heureusement, the new box set from Criterion includes four of the best Guitry films (though I do wish I could swap out Quadrille for Mon Père Avait Raison) and it is a glorious introduction to his substantial and overlooked contribution to cinema. The beginning of Le Roman d’un Tricheur is a tongue-in-cheek, behind-the-curtain peek at the stagecraft of cinema, and a good taste of Guitry’s irreverent, let’s-poke-fun-at-haute-culture approach. (Also, if you notice, Kind Hearts and Coronets is as indebted to Le Roman d’un Tricheur as Bladerunner is to Metropolis.) For better or for worse, these are the films that initiated my love affair with cinema.
If the Met’s massive retrospective and MoMA’s concurrent exhibition of prints aren’t enough to satisfy Picasso devotees this spring, they will fortunately have recourse to yet another venue: the movie theater. Adding fuel to the Picasso frenzy is Arne Glimcher’s documentary Picasso and Braque Go To the Movies, a short but incisive look at how two of art history’s most prominent figures were influenced by the revolutionary medium of cinema. Narrated by none other than Martin Scorsese and featuring interviews with scholars and artists alike, the film doggedly makes the case that moving images exerted a profound influence over the formal development of Cubism, inspiring Picasso and Braque’s invention of a new kind of pictorial space in which, like cinema, reality is viewed from multiple angles at once.
Picasso’s sketches of a cinematograph? You be the judge. [1912]
Occasionally disjointed, the documentary assembles an impressive stream of early film excerpts punctuated with plentiful examples of Picasso and Braque masterpieces (often shown side by side) that fell under cinema’s spell. Film fanatics especially will delight in the early actuality footage of the Lumière brothers and the more fanciful, impish attractions conjured up by George Méliès. Interviews with artists, including contemporary heavyweights such as Chuck Close, Eric Fischl, Julien Schnabel and Coosje Van Bruggen offer intriguing analysis on the aesthetic links between cinema and Cubism, sometimes tying in their own artistic practice as well. (Eric Fischl, for example suggest that Cubist painters emulated cinematic projections by evoking a flickering light source at the edges of their canvasses.) However, those looking for an exploration of Picasso and Braque’s relationship will be disappointed: though the two artists (who were the undisputed Romulus and Remus of the movement) worked so closely together for a period of six years that some of their work was virtually indistinguishable from one another, very little is offered to explain their affinity and the equivalence between their work.
The film makes the case that Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon [1907} was inspired by the serpentine dance of Loïe Fuller.
While the overall premise is of the doc is fascinating, at times the execution leaves something to be desired--at its worst moments, the film plays like an exceedingly well-researched Powerpoint lecture. Rather than allowing the images to construct a vivid sense of the particular correspondences between Cubism and early cinema, the film is overly insistent of its argument, resorting to large-scale generalizations and weak suppositions. However, those that don't mind its boilerplate History Channel approach will appreciate this in-depth study of the compelling intersection of art and film at the turn of the century.
A still from "The Accordion" [Pathé Frères, 1906] and Picasso’s “The Accordionist” [1911], underlining the conceptual similarity of early cinema and Cubism.
Picasso and Braque Go To the Movies is currently playing at Cinema Village in New York, NY.
Happy Together is a story of a fleeting love affair, but it is also a love letter to Buenos Aires. I recently visited the city for the first time and was struck by the slow ebb of energy that pulsates in its streets and cafés, a melancholy aura that betrays nostalgia for a faded past, and dreams for the not-so-certain future.
In Happy Together, the main character Lai Yiu-fai (played by Tony Leung) lives in the neighborhood known as La Boca, literally the mouth of the Riachuelo river. This barrio, with its colorful houses and storied history, is often invoked as as emblematic of Buenos Aires as a whole. The birthplace of Argentinean tango, it is a dangerous neighborhood to walk around in outside the limited tourist district. It is also quite a bit of distance from the city’s center.
The rooftops of La Boca in Buenos Aires
Lai Yiu-fai is shown repeatedly catching the bus to and from La Boca from his job at a doorman at a nightclub. I also took the #29 bus, which looks almost exactly the same today.
Lai Yiu-fai running after the #29 bus
The La Boca bus depot
And here is the La Boca bridge that the two lovers jog across one cold morning:
Ho Po-Wing [Leslie Cheung] and Lai Yiu-fai [Tony Leung]
The La Boca waterfront with the bridge in the background.
And lastly here is El Obelisco, located in the center of the city at Avenida 9 de Julio. Wong Kar Wai uses sped-up footage of this monument, which is located in the middle of the widest street in the world, as as a trope to showcase the swift passage of time.
Godard’s new film Socialisme premiered at the Cannes Film Festival yesterday, and is also being streamed online (though sadly only available to those in France). Though I wasn’t able to view the film (mon dieu did i try) the few reviews I’ve scrounged up are all tentative attempts to make sense of the subject matter, and avoid passing judgment on its aesthetic merits. The film is undoubtedly layered and opaque, and part of the confusion seems to stem from the deliberately obfuscatory subtitles — perhaps Godard’s resistance to translating the film into coherent English is an attempt to undermine its commodification. There is also a lot of controversy over Godard’s no-show at the press conference and the statement he faxed (faxed!) over to Thierry Frémaux, the festival’s director:
Suite à des problèmes de type Grec, je ne pourrai être votre obligé à Cannes.Avec le festival, j’irai jusqu’à la mort, mais je ne ferai pas un pas de plus. Amicalement, Jean-Luc Godard ["Due to problems of Greek type, I can not be obliged to you in Cannes. I would go unto death for the festival, but I will not be able to take a step further. Regards. Jean-Luc Godard"]
This note was accompanied by a portrait of Ozu.
In our flurry to understand the most enigmatic of directors we cannot resist trying to decode this statement. Do “problems of the Greek type” allude to the present-day riots, or is it a more oblique Classical reference? Does Ozu have any special significance? And does the potent phrase “jusqu’à la mort” suggest health problems?
The film also ends with the title card displaying the words “NO COMMENT” (There are no credits). This strikes me as an extraordinarily pessimistic coda, and the lack of subject position/opinion betrayed by this statement is in and of itself a commentary on the possibility of political action. “No comment” is a deflecting phrase, used to fend off ornery inquiries and to eradicate conversation. I can’t really determine anything beyond that without having seen the film, but here is the elliptical trailer (with English subtitles):
Whatever one may think of Godard’s talent as a director, it is difficult to deny the breadth of his intelligence — evidenced by his copious references. When faced with the daunting prospect of having to produce copy on a Godard film after a single viewing, it is only natural that most reviews will fall into one of the two established camps: anti-intellectual hostility or cinephilic adulation. While I personally think Godard is a great director who has produced a few stinkers (e.g. King Lear), I just wish that critics would abandon their usual criteria for evaluating his films, because for Godard, the rules don’t apply (and they never did). Take a deep breath. Soak in the composition and the movement. Use the film as a skein and weave your thoughts around it — the words, the music, the images.
My favorite essay on Godard is actually quite critical of his films — but evinces a strong fascination with his aesthetic philosophy and a desire to determine if the films are good, bad or something in between. The writer is none other than Raymond Durgnat and it is entitled “Asides on Godard” (from The Films of Jean-Luc Godard, ed. Ian Cameron). Here are some excerpts that seem especially relevant in light of Socialisme:
I. God, Godard, Godot
Godard is of Swiss Calvinist stock. His art is basically a Protestant one. Grey, ascetic images reduce the world to a concept of itself. He photographs Karina like Dreyer photographs Falconetti, but reduces her to just a face, mysterious, melancholy, ethereal even gaiety, where Dreyer’s images are sculptural, anguished. There’s flesh in Dreyer, despite the resonances, resemblances between flesh and stone, which asceticism apart, carry the implication that people are real and strong like stone, like rocks of ages. Bu in Godard everything is a grey, jerky flow. Godard’s is an art of the plastic age, of fluent, pliable, putty characters.
Godard’s words-on-images suggest an agnostic, nay nihilistic Bresson, and indeed the Catholic critic Henri Agel accused Bresson of Jansenism, which is a heresy with many Calvinistic connections. Godard’s is a Calvinistic mind astray in a Godless, soulless world, a world of accidents which because they lack essence lack even a felt existence…
Godard’s films which seem to me ludicrously bad fascinate several people whose opinions I respect, and I explain their infatuation as follows (which infuriates them). His evocations of an emotionally and morally lost world would appeal to my acquaintances’ disillusionment, their pain as nice, idealistic, upper-middle class liberals, finding themselves in today’s cool, fluid, cynical world. His despair catches their own melancholy. His best films are those where feelings of pain and loss are most plausible: À Bout de Souffle, Let Petit Soldat, and one or two passages in Pierrot Le Fou, notably the beautiful ending. The feelings are plausible because the characters have positive, focused desires, the frustration of which we observe.
There are of course other reasons for responding to Godard’s duller films. One may be a connoisseur of remarkable idioms and styles. One may be skeptical to the point of nihilism, suffering from a moral and emotional impotence behind which lies just the breath of remorse that appears in Godard’s films…Or one may admire Godard’s bad films because of their sense of the world as unreal — a schizophrenic art for a schizophrenic epoch.
I want to talk about a particular instance (perhaps a small, striking moment) in Bluebeard, Catherine Breillat’s provocative take on the classic fairytale by Charles Perrault. i As she has done in previous films (most notably Anatomy of Hell), Breillat makes use of a framing device to set off the dominant narrative, punctuating the Bluebeard story with interludes of two young sisters reading the tale aloud to each other. As Micheal Koresky writes in his excellent Reverse Shot review:
The device becomes a way for Breillat to both make a greater dramatic point—about how rules of male courtship are imbued into girls at an early age—and to simultaneously deflate her own drama by acknowledging it as child’s play. The younger girl, Catherine, played by five-and-a-half-year-old Marilou Lopes-Benites, is more curious, and in ways more sexually sophisticated than her older sister, Marie-Anne (Lola Giovannetti), even if she mixes up and misinterprets some of the information she’s gleaned from the adult world—when speaking of marriage between a man and a woman, she insists that after the wedding, “they want to become homosexuals.” Her older sister corrects her, saying, “Marriage is when two people love each other.” With a glint of sly self-confidence, little Catherine retorts, “No, homosexuality is when they’re in love.”
This little exchange provokes a genuine burst of laughter — and Breillat in general is not known for inducing giggles. While the joke is funny on a contemporary level (petite Catherine should be enlisted as the cutest Prop. 8 activist ever) it is also a Lacanian jeu d’espirit that reveals an anxiety over heteronormative coupling (which reaches its apogee with marriage). Specifically, it reminds me of an anecdote in L’Instance du La Lettre in which a little boy and a little girl (Lacan informs us they are brother and sister) are seated across from each other in the train compartment. There is a window that affords them a view of the platform where two doors are situated. The little boy speaks first upon the train coming to a stop. “Look,” he says, “We’re at Ladies!” His sister insults him: “Imbecile!” she says, “Don’t you see we’re at Gentlemen.”
But–attendez!–both children are equally mistaken, because they confuse the plaques above the bathroom doors that bear the signifiers “Ladies” and “Gentlemen” with their current location, the name of the train station. Lacan, ever the raconteur, can’t resist a bit of hyperbole when he ostensibly gets around to the point of this story: “To these children, Gentlemen and Ladies will henceforth be two homelands toward which each of their souls will take flight on divergent wings.” This is evidently a joke with not-so-funny moral: Heterosexual orientation (which is by no means biologically necessary) is an association that is gradually learned: it is an ideological position that is taken up through normative conditioning, through repeated re-marking.
The sisters’s dialogue in Bluebeard also emphasizes the role of signifiers as they are inducted (in part through fairytales) into the École des Femmes, and petite Catherine’s playful attitude towards words reveals a suggests an whimsical attitude towards language in which words are not tools but toys, and words can mean whatever the child wants them to mean. (Alice in Wonderland: “At least I mean what I say–that’s the same thing, you know.”) However, what is amusing and curious in children is pathological in adults; evidently, once a child reaches a certain age, he or she cannot play with the materiality of the signifier in quite the same unconscious way.
From a textual standpoint, the framing device reveals Lacanian frame of mind — something I think often gets overlooked when considering Breillat’s approach to cinema. It is the equivalent of a parallax view, providing a vantage point from which to “look awry” at the Bluebeard story. The framing device de-sutures us from the Bluebeard narrative and its accompanying circuit of male/female desire. It also provides an obstacle to identifying too closely with any one character — and that’s exactly what makes Breillat’s films so much more interesting than that particular genre of European art porn (or something like The Girlfriend Experience). Her films constantly question our perceptions of intimacy, which is precisely a question of where we end and others begin.
On that note, here is an extraordinary interview with the provocatrice herself on that very subject. Her view on art: “Everything can be expressed by 24 images per second and 26 letters.”
Vincere means victory, and Bellochio’s latest is a win from start to finish. I saw this film last year at the New York Film Festival and was blown away — almost literally by the Italian Futurist supertitles that whoosh in from above and nosedive their way onto the screen. The film paints a thrilling historical portrait of Ida Dalser, Il Duce’s first wife and suppressed love interest who bore him a child. Aside from its stunning visuals, the film is enlivened by an absolutely bravura performance by Giovanna Mezzogiorno, who is widely known in Italy, and should be more well-known here. An opening shot/reverse shot sequence reveals her attraction for Mussolini as she watches him denounce God in his characteristically overbearing oratory.
A young Mussolini [Filippo Timi] addresses the crowd. Giovanna Mezzogiorno as Ida Dalser is aroused by his singular vision. She is among the many who fall under his rhetorical spell.
This sequence makes it pretty clear that the qualities that make her lust after Mussolini are the same that compel the Italian people to fall for fascism, and that we are to read Dalser’s seduction and subsequent betrayal by Mussolini as allegorical. While it’s entirely possible to read this movie as *only* a historical portrait, you’d be missing half the fun, because Vincere is among the most biting satire that Bellochio has ever produced. The sheer pompousness of some the newsreel footage, the grandiose media gestures and spectacles — Bellochio ushers them in like gangbusters in this condemnation of the state. And yes, Il Duce is an easy target (perhaps too easy) but that doesn’t mean Vincere isn’t worth applauding. Bellochio’s arrows never lack sting, especially in light of contemporary media fascists like Berlusconi.
And for those who love the aesthetics (er, not the politics!) of Italian Futurism, the film offers of a visual feast of fashion, fonts (including the aforementioned supertitles above), and historical footage.
An Italian Futurist Study Guide (To brush up before you go).
Or you can just take a cue from F.T. Marinetti:
“We will glorify war — the world’s only hygiene — militarism, patriotism, the destructive gesture of freedom-bringers, beautiful ideas worth dying for, and scorn for woman. We will destroy the museums, libraries, academies of every kind, will fight moralism, feminism, every opportunistic or utilitarian cowardice.” -The Futurist Manifesto
art + video
It’s Armory Week, and the number of openings, events and parties in the next few days makes my head spin. Aside from the usual mainstays, the new kid on the block this year is the Independent. Born out the ashes of X-initiative, it offers an alternative to the inescapable shopping mall ambiance of the art fair — there’s even a panel on gluttony! And a film program too. Check it out here.
Scope also has a video program, with work by Martha Colburn, George Kuchar and fashion-y films. Sashay!
fashion
Look who’s copying a page from the Vezzoli playbook: Agyness Deyn deigns to appear in a McDermott and McGough film.
film reviews
Andrew Grant (nom de blog: filmbrain) reviews The Ghost Writer, and thinks it’s pretty good.
You should see it, especially since all proceeds from the film go to the Roman Polanski legal defense fund. (Kidding!)
mystery flavor
My favorite posthuman Andrei Codrescu is anti-Avatar, and pro-zombie. Deliciously brainy as always.
My friend Ziyan and I as zombie-vampire hybrids. Kristen Stewart, eat your heart out.
new york
Movie program ephemera from the 8th street Playhouse, which I remember going to as a little girl. Thanks to reader Jack for the tip.
photography Andy Warhol: Unexposed Exposures just opened at Steven Kashar.
If the Factory had had a facebook page, these would be the pictures that they would post to their wall. Lots o’ pics online too.
watch online
The first and only truly Beat film Pull My Daisy (Frank and Leslie, 1959) is on Google Video.
“Is it surprising that prisons resemble factories, schools, barracks, hospitals, which all resemble prisons?” – Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish
“It was about time that Fuck the police! replaced Yes sir, officer! In this sense, the open hostility of certain gangs only expresses, in a slightly less muffled way, the poisonous atmosphere, the desire for salvational destruction by which the country is consumed.” -The Invisible Committee, The Coming Insurrection
Un Prophète has the rare distinction of having been in the right place at the right time. When droves of cinephiles line up to see it when it opens this Friday, they will unfortunately be rather late to the party, for its impact was felt in France last year (and indeed, all the important European film societies showered it with awards quite some ago). If it wins the Oscar for Best Foreign Film, that will only add a shiny American feather to its amply decorated hat, and maybe Audiard will make a film in the U.S. as a result.
Newcomer Tahar Rahim as Malik El Djebana
But what makes this film a cause célèbre in France has nothing to do with the quality of the film itself, although the film will undoubtedly become a classic — it has French Goodfellas written all over it. Un Prophète is important the same way Entre Les Murs [The Class, 2008] was important, because it touches on the changing racial and class dynamics that have been the subject of heated controversy lately, particularly since the appointment of conservative Éric Besson as Minister of Immigration, and his accompanying xenophobic agenda: he is anti-Burka, pro-immigration quotas and re-patriations and thinks that immigrants should have to pass a French language test. (Oh, and schoolchildren should sing La Marseillaise at least once a year.) His policies have led him to be deemed “the most hated man in France” (more hated than Sarko?) and things have only gotten worse since Besson was discovered, in true repressed-politician fashion, to have a secret Muslim girlfriend.
Malik and Corsican mob leader César Luciani [Niels Arestrup]
So what does this have to do with Un Prophète? The film is the coming-of-age story of a young Arab delinquent Malik, who learns to survive in prison by successfully wheeling and dealing with members of the Corsican and Arab gangs that are engaged in a brutal turf war. The socio-political commentary is indirect but it’s pretty damn clear: if the prison is a microcosm of society, the open hostility between the two clans mirrors “in a slightly less muffled way” the conflict between ethnic groups and their struggle for domination. The Corsican gang in particular is threatened by the influx of Arab prisoners; the sheer number makes it hard for them to maintain control. Malik is an interesting figure to put at the center of all of this: ethnically ambiguous, he is forced to kill a fellow Arab at the bidding of a Corsican mafia boss [played wonderfully by Niels Arestrup]. That man comes back to haunt him and suffuses the film with a vaguely preternatural / quasi-religious aura (as do the biblically-inflected chapters and the title of the film itself). Un Prophète has started a national conversation about prison reform, and that’s momentous and necessary, especially when Sarkozy himself refers to the institution as “the nation’s shame.” But what Un Prophète really dramatizes, through its parable of an Arab outsider becoming the ultimate insider, is the ascendency of a new polyglot, multi-racial national identity.
The ghost of Reyeb [Hichem Yacoubi]. This strangely reminded me of the ghost who haunts Gena Rowland’s character in Opening Night.
Titles with Biblical references are interspersed throughout the film.
U.S. viewers are likely to only get a sense of the political overtones, as Un Prophète is also a genre piece that also calls to mind recent gangster films such as Gomorrah, Canet’s Ne Le Dis à Personne, and the two-part Mesrine. But Un Prophète also deserves to be included in that slippery category of “zeitgeist” films, because it takes on a flammable topic, however obliquely, and acutely presages circumstances to come.
Steve McQueen’s Hunger comes out on DVD today from Criterion, and I can’t think of an art-house title from the past year that is more deserving of the “Criterion” treatment (including what must surely be a harrowing Blu-ray release). A video artist turned feature filmmaker, McQueen refuses to talk about his work in convenient, journalist-friendly soundbytes, or define what it’s about for the viewer. In an interview, he cites a conversation between Pauline Kael and Jean-Luc Godard as a source of inspiration for Hunger:
“I found this interview that Godard did with Pauline Kael two days after Bobby Sands died, where Godard essentially said, “The reason why Bobby Sands is important is because he’s childish.” I got this image in my head of this child sitting at the table with some food, and the parents saying, ‘You’re not leaving this table until you finish eating it.’ The kid says no, wrongly or rightly. What time a child goes to bed, or the clothes a child wears, those things are dictated to by experience, and it’s a common situation that the only power a kid has is to refrain from eating. It’s a situation all of us know.”
I love how that one word “childish” spurs an image that allows McQueen to take a specific historical moment — the hunger strike of Bobby Sands — and translate it into a common experience. Here’s what Godard said in the actual interview (Pauline Kael is asking him about film being used a a political weapon):
JLG: …I think a good example is La Chinoise…It was made in 1967 before the 1968 events in France, before the Weatherman here, before the Baader-Meinof in Germany, or the Red Brigade in Italy. At the time it was hated by the left, who said, “These people are ridiculous.” And today, after seeing it fifteen years later, we discover that all of those people, even Bobby Sands a few days ago, are childish, and it’s because they are childish that they are important people.
“Childish” here isn’t used as pejorative — Godard seems to be using it as an adjective to encapsulate a strength of conviction, an uncompromising will, and a sense of stubborn refusal. In La Chinoise, there is a pivotal scene in which the university student Veronique has a conversation with Francis Jeanson, a leftist professor. He repeatedly questions her morals, her anger, and what he considers to be her childish revolutionary actions.
It is evident that the second part of Hunger, in which Bobby Sands confronts a priest who tries to dissuade him from becoming a martyr, is directly inspired by this train conversation. Like La Chinoise, they argue in a very long take, almost in silhouette, forcing the viewer to focus on the dialogue.
Other McQueen news: I recently dropped by his show at Marian Goodman, and despite having missed Yoko Ono by mere moments, I was a bit underwhelmed by Giardini (his film from the Venice Biennale). There is a lovely piece called Static in which McQueen circles the the Statue of Liberty from a helicopter, that transforms the tourist trap back into an object of awe and wonder. It’s a must-see for video art enthusiasts and McQueen completists.
His next project? A biopic about the Nigerian singer Fela Kuti, which will hopefully sidestep the clichés of the genre and will undoubtedly be visually and sonically arresting.
Dennis Lim’s review of Hunger in The New York Times
A nice breakdown of important moments in McQueen’s career from New York Magazine
In Pedro Almodóvar’s latest mise-en-abîme of a film, the protagonist is a director who makes a movie called Chicas y Maletas (Girls and Suitcases). This film is a tongue-in-cheek remake of the movie that put Almodóvar on the map, Mujeres al borde de un ataque de nervios [Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, 1988]. The plot of the latter anything but simple, but the film revolves around Pepa (played by Carmen Maura) who frantically looks for her former lover Ivan in order to give him a suitcase full of his things and to tell him some very important news. The suitcase is a textbook MacGuffin –and it’s worth noting that in Hitchcock’s original explanation, the MacGuffin is literally a piece of baggage — while also symbolizing the emotional baggage of a past relationship, which Pepa must eventually ditch in order to free herself from him. (She ends up throwing the suitcase in a dumpster.)
Carmen Maura as Pepa: on the verge of a nervous breakdown. (Don’t mind the French subtitles.)
In Broken Embraces, Penelope Cruz takes on the Pepa role in the film-within-a-film, with one crucial difference: she’s on crutches. The crutches are not a prop: In the principal plot of Broken Embraces, her husband pushes her down the stairs when she tries to leave him for the director. She is both emotionally and physically crippled by him, but goes on to finish the film despite her disability. The interesting thing about this is that the Spanish word for “crutches” is muletas, which is almost identical to maletas (suitcases). The meaning of the play on words is clear: Her former lover is a crutch that she too must cast aside in order to move on.
Penelope Cruz as Lena, wearing red and leaving with a suitcase of her own.
Carmen Machi as Chon, visiting Lena. [What a fat big toe!"] Lena’s crutches are in the background. (P.S. I love her dress.)
Another layer: the director of the film (Mateo Blanco, who changes his name to Harry Caine) is also impaired: he becomes blind in the car accident in which he loses his lover (Cruz as Lena). Fourteen years later, he re-edits Chicas y Maletas in order to repair himself and move on. Almodóvar, when speaking about this character, mentioned that he recently had been afflicted with crushing migraines and wondered what it would be like to make a film as a blind man. The underlying message of this film, in which life and cinema are fully intertwined? We must live and love despite all handicaps (emotional, physical and everything in between). The last line: “Films must be finished, even in the dark.” This is a fitting metaphor for the creative process as well.
Lluís Homar as the blind Harry Caine: His lack of vision is momentarily overcome by touch as he caresses the screen.
