It’s the funniest thing. Lately, directors who you would normally get giddy with excitement about seeing their latest projects are suffering from a lack of form. The biggest culprit is Woody Allen; he’s literally been making dross for the last ten years. The usually dependable Baz Luhrmann hit a huge bump in the road with the truly awful Australia – hopefully it was just a one-off blip. Hopefully. And now Spain’s king of cinema Pedro Almodóvar. What the hell is going on? Almodóvar has been fairly consistent in producing watchable fare since Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown hit our indie screens in 1988. This is, by his high standards, a real disappointment.

Filmmaker Mateo Blanco (Lluís Homar) was involved in a car crash, which took away his sight. Fourteen years on and he’s going by the pseudonym Harry Caine, in a vague attempt to forget what happened on that terrible night.

In a series of flashbacks, we learn of his relationship with Lena (Penélope Cruz), a young woman coping with the financial and emotional baggage that comes with having a dying father. Her boss, the wealthy businessman Ernesto Martel (José Luis Gómez) is head over heels in love with her. He helps her out with her father’s medical bills, and in exchange she offers him herself.

And they say smoking is bad for you...

Mateo meets with Lena during the casting of his next film. It’s not long before the pair fall in love, trying their best to conceal it from the world, but more specifically her now husband Martel. And so Almodóvar begins to weave his tale of forbidden love and intrigue.

The problem however, is that it isn’t all that intriguing. Almodóvar’s shots and scenes are lovingly put together, all underlined with the kind of soundtrack Hitchcock would have used to underpin the passion between say, Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman. But the story simply doesn’t deserve all this attention to detail; it is too obvious to a fault, leaving the audience disconnected with a bunch of shallow characters.

The only time he manages to perk our attention is with the film within a film sequence; if only he had concentrated on making that – and only that, and we would have all been better off.

His muse Cruz adds nothing to the mix either. The melodrama surrounding her relationships is so poorly constructed, that they have the kind of impact you would expect from a daytime soap opera. And to make matters worse, at one point Lena is pushed down some stairs in the most unconvincing manner; it feels like Cruz was doing it as a way to get £250 for it to appear on You’ve Been Framed.

Add to that some extremely obvious family ‘revelations’ and you soon realise that it’s not only the embraces that are broken in this film. The whole thing is.

It would be understandable for die-hard Almodóvarites to defend it for being a homage to the glory days of cinema; tenderly tipping his hat to classics gone by. But he’s constantly pushing it too far, usually at the expense of an uninspiring story. There’s even a scene where two of his characters are sitting in front of the TV, watching Rossellini’s Viaggio in Italia, starring George Sanders and Ingrid Bergman. Sure, he’s drawing a comparison between the two loved-up couples, but really, it’s difficult not to think “Pedro, just let us watch the rest of that, and let’s not worry about the rest of this nonsense”.

Yes, it proves that Almodóvar is only human, but considering his previous body of excellent work, it’s still a great let down. Let’s just pray that he doesn’t make the same mistake again.