Finally, a trailer for Pedro Almodovar's Broken Embraces with English subtitles! Focusing entirely on Penelope Cruz's beauty and the lush cinematography was all well and good, but it's probably high time for English-speaking audiences to actually know what's happening in this film.
Until you actually watch the trailer, that is, and realize that it's still impossible to figure out what this movie is about. Penelope Cruz is an actress who changes her hair often, and snuggles with a man in various locations. Everyone seems to love her-- but seriously, she's Penelope Cruz, this is not a surprise. Lucky for us the YouTube page includes a synopsis, given that the video was posted by the film's U.K. distributor Pathe. I've included it below the embedded trailer, so you can let the beautiful images wash over you, then read the synopsis in order to figure out what the hell is going on.
A man writes, lives and loves in darkness. Fourteen years before, he was in a brutal car crash on the island of Lanzarote. In the accident, he didnt lose only his sight, he also lost Lena, the love of his life.
This man uses two names: Harry Caine, a playful pseudonym with which he signs his literary works, stories and scripts, and Mateo Blanco, his real name, with which he lives and signs the film he directs. After the accident, Mateo Blanco reduces himself to his pseudonym, Harry Caine. If he cant direct films he can only survive with the idea that Mateo Blanco died on Lanzarote with his beloved Lena.
In the present day, Harry Caine lives thanks to the scripts he writes and to the help he gets from his faithful former production manager, Judit García, and from Diego, her son, his secretary, typist and guide. Since he decided to live and tell stories, Harry is an active, attractive blind man who has developed all his other senses in order to enjoy life, on a basis of irony and self-induced amnesia. He has erased from his biography any trace of his first identity, Mateo Blanco. One night Diego has an accident and Harry takes care of him (his mother, Judit, is out of Madrid and they decide not to tell her anything so as not to alarm her). During the first nights of his convalescence, Diego asks him about the time when he answered to the name of Mateo Blanco, after a moment of astonishment Harry cant refuse and he tells Diego what happened fourteen years before with the idea of entertaining him, just as a father tells his little child a story so that hell fall asleep.
The story of Mateo, Lena, Judit and Ernesto Martel is a story of amour fou, dominated by fatality, jealously, the abuse of power, treachery and a guilt complex. A moving and terrible story, the most expressive image of which is the photo of two lovers embracing, torn into a thousand pieces.
