Broken Embraces (Los abrazos rotos)

Wednesday, November 4th, 2009 @ 7:00pm – Trustees Theater

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 not only lost his sight, but he also lost Lena, the love of his life. This man used two names: Harry Caine, a playful pseudonym with which he signed his literary works, stories and scripts; and Mateo Blanco, his real name, with which he lived and signed the films he directed. After the accident, Blanco reduced himself to his pseudonym, Caine. Since he could no longer direct films, he could only survive with the idea that Blanco died on Lanzarote with his beloved Lena.

In the present, Caine lives thanks to the scripts he writes and to the help he gets from his former production manager and Diego, her son, his secretary, typist and guide. Caine is an active, attractive blind man who has developed all his other senses in order to enjoy life on the basis of irony and self-induced amnesia. He has erased from his biography any trace of his first identity. However, after Diego has an accident, he asks Caine about Blanco, and Caine tells him what happened 14 years before. This is a moving and terrible story of “amour fou” dominated by fatality, jealousy, the abuse of power, treachery and a guilt complex.

Director: Pedro Almodovar

Executive producer: Agustín Almodóvar

Producer: Esther Garcia

Cast: Penelope Cruz, Lluis Homar, Blanca Portillo, Jose Luis Gomez, Ruben Ochendiano, Tamar Novas

2009, 127 min., Spain

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