What better to do on Valentine's than fall in love with Marlene Dietrich all over again?

Broken Embraces (Los Abrazos Rotos)
Directed by Pedro Almodóvar / Spain / 2009 / 127mins. With Penélope Cruz, Lluis Homar, Blanca Portillo, Rossy de Palma

“Broken Embraces” is the richly layered, blatantly symbolic story of a blind film director, Mateo Blanco, expertly played by Lluís Homar, who is now living life as a screenwriter under his former writing pseudonym Harry Caine. The layers go far beyond the obvious, (a filmmaker making a film about a film maker making a film) and each beautifully-framed, elegantly-lit scene is a story in itself.

The story of human relationships — a theme Almodovar has made his signature — is just as captivating as his visuals.

After the accident that blinded him 14 years earlier, Mateo ceased to exist, and Harry Caine emerged. Notice about the death of a prominent businessman, and the arrival of a mysterious stranger, "Ray X," who wishes to hire him to write a particularly personal and disturbing story, triggers a sequence of events that reopen the mystery of the accident. The developments give voice to painful secrets that have remained unspoken all these years.

Almodovar is known for having a strong autobiographical dimension to his films, as well as a particular fascination with the emotional lives of women, and the inspirational quality of actress Penelope Cruz, who is a main character in many of his films. In this film, all these themes are present, as well as his tendency to showcase the potential destructive quality of love: the dark unhealthy aspect such a lofty and rose-colored emotion can inspire in its wake. Here, Cruz plays Lena, a character whose vulnerable surface and distracting outer beauty disguise a darker ability to manipulate and use men for her own needs — even as she appears to be used by them. In crafting the main characters with this extreme dimension of monster/saint, it is to Almodovar's credit and skill that he expresses the glaring contradiction possible in us all, with artful subtlety and restraint. The film embraces the flawed, at times tragic and even violent nature of love. The at times painful perspective is a view Almodovar may well wish to be blinded of, but still, in the end, must write about. A beautiful film that once again shows us so much of what it is to experience in living life as a human with a beating heart, is one of his best. In Spanish with English subtitles.
Friday, Feb. 12 and Saturday, Feb. 13 at 7 and 9:15 p.m.

Von Sternberg and Dietrich Series
The Blue Angel (Der Blaue Engel)
Directed by Joseph Von Sternberg / Germany / 1930 / 124mins. With Marlene Dietrich and Emil Jannings

Josef Von Sternberg’s first film with Marlene Dietrich was “The Blue Angel,” an exquisite parable of one man's fall from respectability, presented in the restored version. German expressionist actor Emil Jannings stars as the repressed instructor of a boys prep school. After learning of his pupils’ infatuation with a local nightclub songstress, he finds himself seduced by the siren Lola Lola (Dietrich). Consumed by desire, he is dragged down a path of personal degradation. Lola's unrestrained sexuality thrust Dietrich to the forefront of sultry leading ladies who were challenging the limits of screen sexuality. In German with English subtitles.
Sunday, Feb. 14 at 8 p.m.

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