Interweaving Endless Realities into One

What I love about film is its sheer boundlessness. Film is a medium in which any other art form can also be present, including paintings, fashion, poetry, and of course film itself. A director can endow the screen with endless depth by consciously displacing viewers from one reality he shows to another he recalls through visual references, weaving all forms together in a self-reflexive manner. The most recent film that fully exploits the potential of meta-cinema is Pedro Almodóvar’s dense and dramatic “Abrazos rotos” (“Broken Embraces”) which came out last year, and which the Center for European Studies recently screened. It is a film about the process of making and remaking a film. Four different films are made inside one, and every single character is also a spectator of one of the four. “Abrazos rotos” is remarkable in how it has taken meta-cinema to a new level, in which there are several films, movie screens, and directors in dialogue and sometimes opposition with one another, each perspective enriching the other and creating a nuanced and unusual kind of film.

In “Abrazos rotos” Almodóvar traces the experience of director and auteur Mateo while he makes and then attempts to remake a film. The film Mateo makes, called “Chicas y maletas” (“Girls and Suitcases”), is actually one of Almodóvar’s previous films which he decides to resurrect, the tragicomedy “Mujeres al borde de un ataque de nervios” (“Women On the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown,” 1988). Another amateur director and character of “Abrazos rotos,” Ernesto Junior, makes a documentary about the process of making the film within a film. Once he is done with the documentary, he has a whole new film in mind that he feels an urge to create with Mateo. In this amalgamation of current, previous and potential films, each film has a very personal motivation—love, jealousy or the search for one’s identity. Despite the numerous and potentially confusing layers, “Abrazos rotos” remains emotionally raw and perfectly coherent.

Not only does Almodóvar show “Chicas y maletas,” a past film he has made, he also makes new films through the eyes of his very own characters. I think that making a film, parts of which are literally filmed by other characters is an act of humbleness. As the perspective in “Abrazos rotos” jumps to the camera of another director—sometimes Mateo Blanco, sometimes Ernesto Junior—Almodóvar is, in a way, sharing or even precluding his authority, as he becomes just one auteur among many. Perhaps the most elaborate acknowledgement of the personality of another character that a film director can make is to put him on the same plane with oneself, and display within his film that character’s original film work, thus appearing to surrender his own space to different eyes.

As the images of “Abrazos rotos” are displaced by the cameras of various fictitious directors, the images also recall the work of actual ones, such as Federico Fellini and Luis Buñuel. For example, Almodóvar films a rotating cosmic structure that may remind viewers of the spaceship in Fellini’s masterpiece “8½,” shows the “8½” DVD box, and a book of the screenwriter who has co-authored many of Fellini’s films, Tonino Guerra.

In the summer of 2009, many months before I saw “Abrazos rotos,” I was in Italy translating the poetry of Tonino Guerra. As I was sitting in the living room of Guerra’s house in Santarcangelo, while drinking tea, he mentioned, “You wouldn’t believe it, some Spanish director is making a film, and wants a character to pack the Spanish translation of my book with him in a suitcase, because he says the character absolutely cannot leave and go anywhere without it. He called me up and asked me for permission this morning.” In reality, it is not that the character, Judit, couldn’t leave without his book, it is that Almodóvar’s film would have probably never existed without a certain film history which preceded it, and Guerra’s screenplays are an enormous part of that history. As Judit travelled across space with the book, Almodóvar travelled in time, keeping the classics in mind. With references like this one, “Abrazos rotos” becomes a celebration, not only of making one movie, but of cinema and creation in general, both past and present.

I admire a master who can craft a movie somewhere in the space between several cameras, several movie screens and many pieces of art, and yet make room not only for an intriguing storyline, but also homage to the films that were written and directed before him. In this work, every character is a spectator of the image, consuming the others’ images, and reality is mediated by so many lenses that it regresses into an infinity as if in a kind of matryoshka—one which holds dolls that are mesmerizing, from all different countries and time periods. In “Abrazos rotos,” which Almodóvar calls a love-letter to cinema, he shows us that before the auteur can be a creator who films something for the sight of others, he must himself be both a viewer and a visionary, one who sees and creatively understands the actual world and the world of film—and then blurs any border between the two.

—Columnist Elizabeth D. Pyjov can be reached at epyjov@fas.harvard.edu.