os amantes

mesmo que não seja um novo caminho, é sempre um prazer para os sentidos, incluindo os sentidos da memória do cinema. desde a escada, que dizem vir daqui, até ao acidente joga-se Hitchcock. é um puzzle de cinema que me fez lembrar Man in the Dark, o mesmo jogo. no pior, os beijos recortados de Cinema Paradiso, nas mãos cegas que querem tocar a película.

"One scene in particular clearly shows Almodóvar’s influences: the climatic scene where Lena and Ernesto fight at the top of the grand staircase, resulting in Lena’s spectacular fall. It’s a scene that evokes several moments from cinema’s history, where staircases have long been iconic architectural features. The Odessa steps sequence in Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin (Eisenstein, 1925) not only defined the modern conception of film editing, it has also spawned several homages, such as The Untouchables (De Palma, 1987) and The Godfather: Part III (Coppola, 1990). The staircase is also an image that evokes classic Hollywood. Many a Hitchcockian tragedy has taken place in a room at the top of a flight of stairs, not to mention Cary Grant ascending shadow strewn steps in Suspicion (Hitchcock, 1941), carrying a glass of milk which may or may not be poisoned. Of course, there’s Scarlett O’Hara who was either falling down, or being swept off her feet and carried up, a sweeping staircase in Gone with the Wind (Fleming, 1939).

Almodóvar refers to the staircase sequence in Broken Embraces as the “backbone of the
narrative” and it is a scene he is immensely proud of. He himself recalls his own sources of inspiration for the scene: “I remember the staircase where the pregnant Gene Tierney throws herself down in Leave Her to Heaven (Stahl, 1945) along with Él (Buñuel, 1953)… the best film about the madness of jealousy.”

The staircase scene in Broken Embraces reveals one of the key stylistic influences, that of film noir. The predominantly Hollywood genre of the forties and fifties recalls films filled with gangsters in trilbies and poisonous yet charismatic femme fatales. Whilst elements of film noir are also evident in Bad Education (Almodóvar, 2004) Broken Embraces represents the director’s most vivid foray into the genre. Aesthetically it is most notable in the sharply contrasted lighting and narratively in the thrilling tale of passion, jealousy and deception."

(daqui)

para mim, espero guardar os amantes, aqui num pico de maldade irónica. da cegueira do amor à obsessão cega dele e à vergonha dela. há tantas razões para tapar a cara e fechar os olhos. andar às cegas. somos todos cegos, diz o Saramago. Magritte, Magritte.

“I feel it’s the first time I’ve made such an expressive declaration of love to cinema; not with a specific sequence but with a whole film. To films as they were made at the moment they were made. To something that, although you can make a living from it, is not only a profession but also an irrational passion.” (diz Almodovar, também daqui)

Lanzarote, amor eterno. "A decade ago, film-maker Pedro Almodóvar took a photograph of El Golfo beach in Lanzarote. When he got the pictures developed, he could just make out two tiny figures standing on the sand. Intrigued, he had the shot enlarged, and revealed a couple locked in a tight embrace, lost in the landscape. The image, which he called The Secret of El Golfo, niggled away at him for years, eventually inspiring the story that would become Broken Embraces, his latest film, on general release here from 28 August. Although most of the action takes place in Madrid, the scenes shot in Lanzarote are crucial to the plot and set the tone for the whole film." daqui, onde se compara ao revelar da imagem de Blow-Up. ("The beach is actually a volcanic crater eroded by the sea, and the green stain is a lagoon.")