Broken embraces

Audiences are not supposed to take Pedro Almodovar's films seriously. They are supposed to giggle, guffaw and groan. The prolific Spanish director is an entertainer, a master of soap operatics.

He composes cinematic arias for his leading ladies and they revel in performing his high notes. Every actress in an Almodovar movie is so clearly in her element, and their male counterparts are treated almost as well. In Broken Embraces, it may seem that this is another vehicle (the fourth) that Pedro built for Penelope Cruz. It is, but it's also got a handful of extra seats for other ladies to fill passionately.

Cruz is Lena, the mistress of an ageing magnate. She's a wannabee actress, and he funds the production of a comedy she wants to make with director Mateo (Lluis Homar). Her father is dying, reason enough for a veteran actress to emote as her mother. Another Almodovar favourite, Blanca Portillo, is the director's loyal agent and the single mother of a sickly boy.

Fourteen years in the future, the director's blind and has sought sanity from bad memories by adopting a pseudonym, Harry Caine (yes, Michael must be chuffed by such an offbeat honour). Bit by bit, we are shown scenes from the comedy's sets, and scenes of the "making of" documentary being filmed by the magnate's son. He's gay, gratuitously so, but you knew there had to be at least one somewhere in an Almodovar concoction.

It's easy to sense that the master chef of serio-comic cinema adores sexual romps, outrageous plot twists, the whole movie business, and actresses with super-expressive eyes. The dvd extras reveal more of Almodovar's free-wheeling scripting genius with a trio of wonderful deleted scenes and one script read-through in which Pedro advises Penelope what her character's inner thoughts are. Best of all is the specially-shot comedy short, The Cannibalistic Councillor, expanding the hilarious character of the chubby, cocaine-snorting, cake-munching, sexually avaricious, foot-fetishist friend in the film within a film. That role is a gift, surely written specially for another longtime pal of Pedro, comic actress Chuz Lampreave.

Naturally, Cruz triumphs as a woman with a life comprising at least three roles. One of them is pretending to be an Audrey Hepburn lookalike who can't act very well on-screen. She alone is reason enough to enjoy the latest Almodovar quality soap opera. All the other women are great bonus reasons.