I once sat in a pintxo bar in San Sebastian with Joseba Elizando, Miguel 'the Handsomest Man in the World' Miranda, and Wayne Kruer, an American ex-pat professional basketball player. Wayne was drafted by the Celtics, cut in training camp and had played in the Spanish pro leagues for a few seasons. He chained smoked Ducados and spat out Spanish and English in a voice only a million cigarettes could create. 'Michael,' he rasped, 'tell the waitress that you love her when she comes back and you want to take her to America.' Why would I want to do that, I asked. 'Because she is beautiful, she's over twenty and not married, and when you don't take her with you tomorrow I will console her.'
Joseba, well known at the bar, part gypsy, began to clap his hands and sing a flamenco ballad. Some song of love and loss, his booming deep voice silencing the bar, causing the little children to stop running beneath the hams hanging from the ceiling. Miguel played the twelve-string guitar a wealthy older man in Washington, DC gave him the summer he lived with my brother.
There is a rich light in Spanish bars, a perpetual golden late summer's afternoon light. It illuminated the strong faces all around us, faces full of character, showing their lives and years, striking and memorable. The conversations, stopped for a while as Joseba's song reminded everyone of the injustice of love, resumed in a basso undertone. A woman stood and shouted for more wine. The waiter took her in a passionate embrace when he brought it and kissed her as if he was leaving for the front. A man at her table looked down helplessly, his fists so tightly clenched the knuckles were pure white with tension. The perfectly dressed and made up ladies of a certain age near the door eyed Miguel with some knowledge. Who are they I asked him? Carrothas, he replied, broken down old wagons. Do you know them? Once.
I write this because it has been my experience that there is something unique about that country. A story in every face. The blood of La Guerra Civil just there outside the window or behind the door. The Reconquista never forgotten. Its art, literature, music, and movies unmistakably Spanish.
As is Pedro Almodovar.
It has been a long drought movie wise over the last weeks. Little to see, and those seen, forgettable or worse. Until today and Pedro Almodovar's Los Abrazos Rotos, translated as Broken Embraces.
I speak only bar Spanish, but Los Abrazos Rotos seems more complicated and weighty than Broken Embraces, just as 'je t'embrasse tres tendrement', means more than hugs! I texted a bilingual friend, who confirmed the translation, but this is a friend who is notoriously didactic.
Los Abrazos Rotos sounds so much more romantic, and reflects better, to this non-Spanish speaker, the complicated, weighty story that this movie tells than the prosaic: Broken Embraces. It is the latest Pedro Almodovar movie. One of a string of great movies he has made. His is a unique style, unmistakably Spanish, unmistakably Pedro Almodovar. Two minutes into it, I was hooked. Almodovar can tell a story with a simple set up and a few lines of dialogue. His art direction is perfect, his camera sense always engaging, his stable of deep voiced Spanish actors and actresses, riveting.
I remember a teacher telling me of the genius of Balzac, his pitch perfect stories of the human condition. Almodovar is like that: pitch perfect modern stories of love, jealousy, family, pain, daily life, living, and death. Generations from now I would bet that students will watch his movies to get some sense of what life was like over the last twenty years.
His movies demand attention. They are not frenetic, they move languorously, but attention must be paid as various plots unfold within bigger plots. Or more accurately, lives are described among other lives and you find yourself in Pedro's pintxo bar with Joseba, Miguel, the beautiful waitress, and the old ladies at the door. Much of the pleasure of watching comes from listening to the stories within stories that play out in front of the camera. Abrazos begins with a seduction. It ends with a movie within a movie. We are seduced from beginning to end. Seduced by the acting, the art direction, the complete originality of the directors vision and story telling. By those expressive Spanish faces, their deep voices, and slurred quick melodic language.
A blind writer has changed his name, his life, his career, and the movie tells us why. The why is the pleasure of any story and there have been few directors who can tell stories so effortlessly. A poster for a blood drive becomes a five-minute aside in the movie. The five minutes completely involving as imagination transforms the poster into a movie script that I would pay to see.
Penelope Cruz, more beautiful now than in her youth, mesmerizing on the big screen. Her character so sympathetic, her life so complicated, her acting so believable that she is not Penelope Cruz but a woman who, as she says, of all things, wants a man to love her and she to love him. As if that is too much to ask. But Almodovar knows that in such simplicity is impossibility. Who doesn't want to truly love and be truly loved in return? And, how many find that person?
Love, lust, blackmail, violence, a beautiful woman, ambiguity, red tomatoes sliced as hearts are sliced open by unrequited love or an unfaithful lover. Treachery, truths told, secrets revealed, fathers and sons, and suddenly, the movie was over.
It can't be that this movie's title can be translated merely into Broken Embraces. Los Abrazos Rotos must be Spanish for 'The Best Movie of The Season.' Or, con amor, it should be translated: 'Why We Love to go to Movies.'