Cannes '09 Day 7: Almodovar, Adjective

Pedro Almodovar has been Pedro Almodovar in such different ways for so long that the selves have started to pile up. The only way for him to make sense of them all is by talking them through. This morning we all eagerly poured into the Palais only to discover, somewhat crushingly, that all Almodovar intended to do was talk. “Broken Embraces” is a gabfest, loquacious even by the director’s own admittedly wordy standards. Melodrama talks its way into a thriller then back to melodrama then into not-terribly-funny comedy. Redefining the limits and rules of genres has always interested the Spaniard. But now “Almodovar” is its own genre – it’s several, in fact – and suddenly the director seems boxed in by himself.

The story involves a film director (Lluís Homar) who’s lost his sight and now writes screenplays. He learns that a wealthy executive (José Luis Gómez) has died, and the film sets out to explain how these two know each other. The flashbacks rewind to the early 1990s and turn up Penélope Cruz as the executive’s secretary. A series of events lead her into the arms of the film director before he lost his sight and rust-colored hair. The director narrates most of this to the son (Tamar Novas) of his manager (Blanca Portillo). What he doesn’t narrate, the manager does in exhausting detail.

Almodovar is more than artist enough to show us most of what we’re told. This might be the least cinematic of all his movies. There is loveliness – the sight of Cruz in a series of wigs, say, that make her look like Marilyn Monroe and, best of all, Audrey Hepburn. But the story isn’t told in images. It’s expressed in words. I suspected we were in danger right from the start when Almodovar’s dreamy Technicolor title sequence had been replaced with a drab-looking opening shot through a digital camera lens.

"Broken Embraces" is essentially a nostalgia trip to the 1990s, Almodovar’s early-middle period. But why? These are the years that brought us “Tie Me, Tie Me Down,” High Heels,” and “Kika”: emotionally and sexually callow movies (in the new film, the gays are a joke). They were hungry for sensation, devoid of the daring of his early years and in need of the narrative, visual beauty of his most recent run. Members of his old acting stable appear briefly, including Rossy De Palma (pictured above, with Cruz). But even that feels shrugged off.

“Broken Embraces” has more of Almdovar’s terrific regulars in the leads and is meant to feel like his usual fun house, complete with trap doors and hall of mirrors. But there’s not much fun: The traps doors are visible for miles, and the mirrors manage to distort very little. This time the fun house feels too complacently like home.

There wasn’t a lot of time to savor the Almodovar. Of course, there wasn’t a lot of Almodovar to savor in the first place. But, again, I digress: The Romanians awaited. Ah, the Romanians. Nowadays, no truly international festival is complete without them. And, of late, Cannes has been particularly instrumental in popularizing their cinema. Christian Mungiu’s abortion-procurement thriller “4 Months, 3, Weeks, and 2 Days” made a strong showing here two years ago, and this year Mungiu returns, sharing the limelight with some of his friends and less heralded countrymen. He and four other directors are here with “Tales of the Golden Age,” five short films they’ve made about Romania’s Communist propaganda during the Ceausescu era.

This is probably the most efficient way to experience what makes the Romanians such distinctive moviemakers. They are comedians and tragedians often within the same movie, but in either instance only casually so. The movies are made in an almost deadpan style that’s close to realism but loose enough to incorporate melodrama, polemic, and farce. Nothing is flashy – the muted colors and uninflected style seem like extensions of the national psyche. The characters are good, everyday people – no one’s impoverished but some of the judgment is often instructively poor. “Golden Age” is the jauntiest and most openly allegorical thing I’ve seen them attempt. It’s witty, its contents succinct and entertaining. They’re some of the most natural storytellers in movies. Narrative moviemaking has a good name in their hands.

The stories in “Golden Age,” like a lot of the modern Romanian films, build to a climax by way of explanation, courtesy of a punch line. The first film is set in a village that’s eagerly anticipating the arrival of a government caravan and ends with a funny amusement-park metaphor for the downside of party loyalty: it costs common sense. The second, which involves the party newspaper’s doctoring a photo of Ceausescu, ends with an even better joke. The others are kinds of morality tales, all hinging on a combustible mix of desperation and bad decision-making.

Speaking of bad judgment, by now I should have mentioned that one of my favorite films so far is also Romanian, Corneliu Porumboiu’s “Police, Adjective.” It’s characteristically Romanian, but lest I leave the impression that these films are somehow the same I should clarify. The Motown Sound was a unifying style, but it’s impossible to confuse “I Heard It through the Grapevine” with “Love Child.” Porumboiu’s movie is its own achievement (his first was 2006's "12:08 East of Bucharest"). The new film is built around a Bucharest detective named Cristi (Dragos Bucur) and his conclusion of a rather petty drug case. He’s been working on it for about a week, and his boss thinks it’s time to make an arrest. But he wants to be perfectly certain that the right people are rounded up.

It is accurate to point out that most of the film involves the detective’s surveillance of his suspects and that it’s not always compelling to watch. But between his stints of walking and standing around, Cristi is embroiled in a series of minor debates about everyday laws and logic. He tells an out of-shape co-worker who wants to play tennis with him that fitness is a lawful requirement to play sports. In a very funny scene, he complains to his wife, a schoolteacher, that the lyrics to a song she loves make no sense. Cristi is a snob of sorts, humorless and seemingly incapable of the whimsies necessary for romance. But this being a Romanian film, Cristi’s personal certitudes are called into question during the film’s last act.

The cop movie you thought you were watching turns into an altogether different kind of investigation, one about function versus philosophy and that hinges on the reading of a dictionary. I’m not sure the definition of a word has ever been as simultaneously suspenseful and cruelly funny as it is here. The climax of “Police, Adjective” contains as much explanation as the climax of “Broken Embraces.” The difference is that Almodovar uses explication as a means to a rather monotonous end. With Porumboiu, discourse breaks the film wide open and lifts it to greatness.

“Police, Adjective” –- along with Bong Joon-ho’s “Mother” and Lee Daniels’s “Precious” –- has elicited some aggravation in and around the Palais that Un Certain Regard, which is a secondary competition, is where the best movies have been programmed. The main competition this year seems bloated with big names not working at the height of their powers. Lars von Trier aside, the young and lesser known are causing most of the excitement all over the festival at both ends, of the quality spectrum.

Despite my reservations about “Mother,” it’s still a stronger movie than most of the main competition films that have screened. Of course, I don’t make these difficult programming decisions, folks like the festival’s dedicated, hard-working president, Thierry Frémaux, do. But if I had my druthers, I’d swap the Almodovar for Porumboiu in a heartbeat.