Pedro Almodóvar’s Broken Embraces is an attempt at film noir; it comes off as film rose. The movie has all the elements that Americans have come to expect from romantic European exports—it’s leisurely, uninhibited, sophisticated, pretty. But Almodóvar tries to jam the appurtenances of old-school American pulp on to the frolicsome Old World obverse, and they just don’t stick.

This isn’t to say that film noir is a Teflon genre; it’s been a popular pomo-tivator for artists in the last few decades, partly because of the movies’ idiosyncratic gaudiness. Filmmakers understandably like to toy with canted angles and chiaroscuro, with light filtering in from louvers, and the silvery wisps of smoke that hover in it. All this can be show-offish, yes, but it’s also shorthand for how yummy those dark corners of civilization can be. (The problem arises when filmmakers overwork the fancy-pants effects to compensate for their creative shortcomings—when, after the smog disappears, and the coughing fit abates, one sees that there was nothing behind the fumes.) Crucially, though, noirs’ nocturnal underworlds betray outdated notions of justice and evil. Modern filmmakers who’ve co-opted the noir style—such as the Coen brothers, David Lynch, and, to an extent, Martin Scorsese—can dig the ostentation while still having it inform their descants.

Like most factory-film genres, noirs 1.0 were often normative. Bad things happened to bad people in most Hollywood releases; but, in noirs alone—following in the ’30s gangster movies’ wake—the bad people were the protagonists. (I’m speaking less about detective features than I am thrillers like Double Indemnity and The Postman Always Rings Twice, which, like Broken Embraces, concerned infidelity.) By contrast, the lawmen and pioneers of Westerns were poster children for good-ol’ American Progress. Until circa Vietnam, the notion that our frontier forebears were anything but tough-willed and pure at heart was considered unsalable in the mass-media marketplace. However, the dregs dredged up by noirs (which were set in the present day) were everymen who’d given in to temptation. By the standards of 1940s and ’50s censorship, those were justified grounds for finger wagging; but, to audiences, such indiscretions were probably a welcome relief from their usual doses of Hollywood virtue. Some noirs winked at the audience from behind their censorial cages: If Bogart and Bacall’s double entendres in The Big Sleep were literalized, their dirty talk might make sexters squeamish. But all noirs were products of repression—censorial and societal.

Francisco Franco prehistory aside, Almodóvar’s blue-skied Madrid seems as repressive as a topless beach. The only agent of repression in Broken Embraces is, true to form, the rich cuckolded husband (José Luis Gómez). He knew all along that he wouldn’t be able to maintain his grip on lovely Lena (Penélope Cruz—performing well, though lacking the vivacity she had in Vicky Cristina Barcelona), particularly when she signed up to make her acting début in a film by pickup artist Mateo (Lluís Homar), alias: Harry Caine.

Mateo’s pseudonym (a reference to Postman author James M. Cain?) is one of Almodóvar’s sundry allusions. But they’re all signs pointing in the wrong direction. These aren’t red herrings that keep our minds in flux as we parse through the core mystery; rather, they remind us of how minimal the mystery is. I don’t want to give away the story too much because Almodóvar has a smooth, masterly way of threading us through it that’s pleasurable in and of itself. But his patience and playfulness, his commitment to the cast and its characters—all positive attributes for a filmmaker—seem to whitewash the noir.

In the ’40s classics, the huffy heavies—small-time evil—were vanquished by the end credits; in ’70s neo-noirs (such as Chinatown), evil trickled down from the top, and was not so easily placated. Here, evil is basically nonexistent; evil is the red herring. In a high Hitchcockian pirouette, the jealous industrialist knocks his openly cheating inamorata down a staircase; but he and his Eurotrashy frumplet of a son (Rubén Ochandiano) draw the line on dirty deeds there. (The hoary cuckold isn’t sexually infirm, but the movie climaxes early.) Perhaps I’m depraved on some level, but Broken Embraces—by annulling, rather than solving, the “mystery”—didn’t give me the release I wanted; Almodóvar lines up the dominoes and then… they evaporate. Even the director’s heady bouts of meta-filmmaking—the movie opens on an eye—are weak sauce. They don’t cohere. With little visual cues to Peeping Tom, etc., he’s throwing cineastes off his trail; but that leaves no solid ground for us to stand on. In some ways, the resolution is downright inadequate: The tragedy could be blamed on one character’s negligence, and yet, for all his Mediterranean ardor, guilt doesn’t affect him much.

But it must sound as though I hated the movie. Not true. If it goes wrong—and quite clearly I think it does—it’s for the right reason: Almodóvar’s generosity—his artistry—transcends this noir-ish mishmash. Like chocolates, noirs are better dark. But they require someone like Lynch working within their framework—someone who can make the old conventions mean something new, someone who makes the darkness seem immanent. Almodóvar is simply too sunny. In this world of Broken Embraces, evil can be peeled off like a Band Aid.