Lena, Mateo and Ernesto are caught up in a vintage film-noir triangle. Lena (Penélope Cruz) is a willful beauty with a lurid secret. She lives in luxury with the much-older Ernesto (José Luis Gómez), a wealthy Madrid businessman, but is falling under the spell of Mateo (Lluís Homar), a celebrated movie director, who has cast her in his latest picture. Ernesto, possessive and ruthless, has arranged to become the film's producer, and has assigned his unstable son (Rubén Ochandiano) to shoot a video documentary about the making of it — footage that allows Ernesto, back in his mansion in Lena's increasing absences, to track her deepening relationship with Mateo.

Pedro Almodóvar's "Broken Embraces" is a rapt essay in film-noir atmosphere — the classic black-and-white fog of desperation, treachery and impending disaster — which has been translated here in carefully calibrated color. Each scene is a rich mélange of muted hues; but virtually every scene is also daubed — in a shirt, a car, a pair of gleaming high-heeled shoes — with a splash of red: the color of lust and danger, and of course blood.

The movie begins in the present day, but its story is rooted, in the noir tradition, deep in the past. When we meet him at the outset, Mateo is a blind man living alone. No longer able to direct films, he has adopted the pseudonym Harry Caine, under which he continues to fashion successful scripts. For him, the famous Mateo of years before is dead, killed in the car crash that left him sightless more than a decade ago. Lena, we notice, is no longer around; and Mateo has just learned that Ernesto has died.

Mateo is tended by his longtime production manager, Judit (Blanca Portillo), and by her son, Diego (Tamar Novas), who acts as his typist and, when Mateo ventures outside, as his eyes. One day, Diego prods him for the story he's always avoided telling — the story of what happened to Mateo and Lena, and what part Ernesto played in it. As Mateo reels back the years, we witness Ernesto's mounting jealousy and the terrible revenge — both personal and professional — that he pursues; and we watch as Mateo and Lena flee to the long black beaches of the Canary Islands in a doomed attempt to evade it.

Almodóvar's script is ingeniously imaginative, guiding us in measured steps through the story's unfolding secrets. There's a brilliant scene involving Ernesto and a lip-reader whom he's hired to put words to the silent footage of Mateo and Lena that he's watching — a narrative interrupted when Lena slips into the room and begins filling in the missing words herself. And there's a wonderful moment when Mateo and Diego are batting around new script ideas and Diego comes up with one for a vampire movie — an idea that's actually so good, you can almost hear screenwriters on both sides of the Atlantic scurrying to their computers to turn it into a real movie.

Almodóvar is such a master of the film medium — of framing, pace and visual texture — that even if this movie had no linear plot, it would still be a rich pleasure simply to register his images as they passed before our eyes. (A shot of two lovers in a carnal rumpus under a shroud of bed sheets might have been lifted out of a Magritte painting; and a kitchen scene in which we see a fallen tear run down the side of a plump red tomato is so original a flourish we can't help but smile.) The actors confine themselves entirely to servicing the story; and Cruz, in her latest collaboration with the director, remains such a gorgeous camera subject that her emotional eloquence as an actress still comes as a revelation.

"Broken Embraces" is as much about movies themselves (it's seeded with references to Fritz Lang, Jules Dassin and Roberto Rossellini) as it is about the elegantly-tied knots of its plot. At the age of 60, Almodóvar, one of the most fertile and seductive artists in world film, remains intoxicated by the medium his work so memorably adorns.

Check out everything we've got on "Broken Embraces."

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