Almodóvar and Cruz back together for Broken Embraces

The annals of director-actor relationships are long and storied—Leone-Eastwood, Scorsese-DeNiro, Burton-Depp—but among the least celebrated living examples has to be Pedro Almodóvar and Penélope Cruz.

When Almodóvar first cast Cruz, in 1997’s Live Flesh, he was known as a director of transgressive, sex-drenched camp in Spain, she as a local starlet still waiting for her break. When they re-teamed for 1999’s All About My Mother, an instant foreign smash, they rode an international wave of critical hype. And by the time they premiered their latest, Volver, together at the Cannes Film Festival in 2006, both went home with top prizes and a permanent place among art-house royalty.

With news by way of Variety that Sony Pictures Classics has agreed to an American release for the pair’s latest, Broken Embraces (another of Almodóvar’s genre-bending puzzles, this time a self-described “four-person love story”), it looks as if they’re not keen to end their success anytime soon. The film will be Almodóvar’s first since Volver and will follow a major year for Cruz, who starred in the adaptation Elegy and Woody Allen’s Vicky Cristina Barcelona, in which she stole scenes as a mad and uproarious Spanish artist.

Although it’s often hard to pin down the plot of an Almodóvar movie even after you’ve seen it, the director has said Embraces is “the most novel-like story I have written,” and the rumor is that the film is styled as a classic 1950s noir. Can there still be singing?

Related links:
Review: Vicky Cristina Barcelona
Review: Elegy
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