Fashion

Winter culture index

Nantucket chic, Penélope Cruz speaks, Polaroid makes a comeback and why gallerinas are the new It girls.

Here’s a cruel trick: The opening close-up in Pedro Almodóvar’s Broken Embraces is not of Penélope Cruz, but of an average woman. The camera operator focuses the shot. When it’s just right, said woman leaves the frame. Enter Penélope, stunning and immaculately made up. In a flick of her lash, she erases all trace of vérité from the screen. Broken Embraces (in theatres December 25) is an ode to Pedro’s Penélope—the creation of a mystery, like a studio siren from glamour days gone. Among many things, it’s a meta-romance between the on-screen director (Mateo, played by Lluís Homar) and his star (Cruz’s Lena). Mateo is in love, not with Lena, in the end, but with her goddess-like image. Perhaps that’s how it is with Almodóvar and Cruz too?

“It is a different kind of relationship, but there’s the same affection—we love each other,” Cruz says. “We always know what the other person is thinking. He would sometimes play Mateo’s role and take my picture.” But though the director switches roles, Cruz stays firmly in hers. Even after 12 years, she wants no say in her Almódovar roles. They’re handed to her like dresses, and she slips them on with seeming ease. “I’m always surprised by my characters,” she says. “The first time, I was a whore giving birth in a bus. Then, a nun that gets pregnant from a transvestite. Every time, I have this moment of ‘Really? Isn’t this going to be too much? How are we going to make this believable?’ And then he does it, every single time.”—Sarah Nicole Prickett

First published in FASHION Magazine December 2009

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