Almodovar gave us a Russian doll of a film: Here Mateo Blanco’s cine-biography showcased the making of his ‘Cruz masterpiece;’ a clear homage to Hepburn and Monroe, an entire genre even. As the plot unfolds the embryonic masterpiece is apparently stillborn through the expose of a highly charged, investigative and destructive docu-film. The rationale behind this ’embedded’ film simply a failed attempt at exercising sexual power (Ernesto). What this subterfuge did forge was the emergence of Blanco’s alter-ego, the ironically ‘sightless’ Harry Caine, Blanco’s apparently doomed self. Finally, we share the restorative freedoms, new sight of the phoenix-like ” Girls and Suitcases,” a film having all the power of re-making old embraces and building new ones in Blanco’s seemingly broken life. This tongue-in-cheek film encapsulated the power to revive hope and joy through its re-mastering; Blanco embraces the new vision of his ear to remaster the film, in a sense shaping something somehow more fresh than the creative vision of the eye. It is here that the vengeful ex-lover gifts son to father and father to son as the most central and restorative creative embrace.
This portrayal of sexual jealousies, rivalries, betrayals and touching love moved sinuously through the entire sequence of the film. Embraces are broken and re-made: Harry/Mateo is adored, perhaps despised and yet adored by his one-time lover who appears more central to the underlying plot than Cruz who is visually very ‘there,’ however is essentially the catalyst for events.
From the outset we see the ex-mistress exercise care and tolerance for Blanco’s sexual excesses which in their turn mould her into a person she despises, whose acts she must confess. Whilst she at root exercises the power of taking away the thing he loved more than her, apparently more than his film, even perhaps his life, she re-establishes to some degree the fixity of familial embrace at the end of the film…his life as we observe it. He embraces a film he appeared to think little of, a film of great wit acknowledging the love of his life and inspiring the support and love of his newly discovered son and ever-present ex-mistress who broke his cinematic dream, his very vision, the love of his life, out of a desire to only embrace and be embraced by him. She was the one who also secretly embraced his great movie amidst its apparent ashes. What we and he are left with is a good-humoured rather playful film, “Girls and Suitcases” which seems to offer up the hope of an end to all the broken enbraces layered within this film of his films and life.
