Beautifully 'Broken'

From the New York Times profile on Penelope Cruz and Pedro Almodóvar in relation to their newest work together, "Broken Embraces." Great stuff here: 

"Mr. Almodóvar’s films with Ms. Cruz have often found the sweet spot where the ornate trappings of melodrama eventually fall away to reveal deeper and more complicated emotions and motives. They’ve also offered Ms. Cruz some of her richest opportunities. In the 1997 thriller 'Live Flesh,' she dominates the first 10 minutes, playing an impoverished prostitute in 1970 Madrid who gives birth on a city bus.

"Two years later, when he was casting 'All About My Mother,' which would win the Oscar for best foreign-language film, Mr. Almodóvar called upon her again, this time to play a nun. Even as she falls into an affair with a transvestite and becomes H.I.V.-positive, she remains the film’s sweetest, purest presence. 'It surprised me when he told me what the role was,' she recalled. 'But I thought, ‘Only Pedro could make this real, because he has no judgment against any of these characters.’ ”

"And in the 2006 drama 'Volver,' Ms. Cruz earned her first Academy Award nomination for playing a determined widow who was an amalgam of women from Mr. Almodóvar’s childhood in La Mancha, albeit with a little Sophia Loren thrown in to place her within the fabric of movie history that is woven through all of his work.

“'Someone asked me, ‘Is she a muse for you?,’ said Mr. Almodóvar, whose long-term collaborations with actresses, beginning with Carmen Maura through the 1980s, have been famously fruitful and sometimes just as famously volatile. 'Well, yes. She is a muse for me in the sense that a muse is someone who makes you better than you are. I think I am a better director with her, because she believes that I am better than I am, and that blind faith gives me a lot of strength.'”

Read the entire piece here. And here's a trailer for what is sure to be one of my favorite films of the year: