Sangre, fetiche, ceguera: deseos y abrazos rotos

Second part of the (until now) dark almodovarian trilogy about male desire, the “Woman” object of that desire, and its devastating avatars (with Talk to her [2002] and The skin I live [2011]), The broken hugs constitutes one of the peaks of the filmography of Pedro Almodóvar, combining the reformulation of certain formal themes from the box of Hitchcockian film forms – but also, and here very especially, the best Spanish cinema (Lorenzo Llobet-Gràcia) – with a very subtle non-transferable formal distillation. A writing that, starting from images in a certain way “away from the world” by graphic and metacinematographic saturation, takes the process to such a degree of abstraction that it is capable of (re) activating them by rubbing each one with similar ones, reaching an unusual one emotional power to speak of the wounds of the world and of desire, to return to touch the lost reality through an ostentatious and extravagant but ultimately fruitful formalist hypertrophy.