Tag: Almodovar

Strange Way of Life

Posted on by victorfraga

The story opens up with a young man singing the famous fado song Estranha Forma de Vida (Portuguese for “Strange Way of Life”). He is sitting on the porch of a large and precarious wooden house, one of those that you see in every spaghetti Western movies. His gaze is firm yet sad. The image will immediately evoke Caetano Veloso singing Cucurrucucu Paloma in Almodovar’s Talk to Her (2002). Except that the man singing isn’t Caetano Veloso. Yet the wistful warble indeed belongs to the Brazilian singer and composer, a recurring voice in Almodovar’s oeuvre. The tone is set. This is a melancholic drama. A queer Western infused with Latin flavours.

The story evolves around middle-aged sheriff Jake (Hawke) and his lover from 25 years earlier Silva (Pascal). The two are unexpectedly reunited in an intense carnal evening, but the sheriff suspects that Silva’s sudden apparition this has nothing to do with affection. That’s because Silva’s son is being investigated by the Jake, and could be tried for murder. In the morning, the two men consistently vet, question and challenge each other’s sentiments and motives, in an elaborate duel between reason and emotion. They reminisce the past. A flashback reveals that they first fell in love in an evening doused in wine and pierced by bullets.

Vivid red is prominent throughout the film, from the opening title to the wine and the blood that inevitably washes their sins. The evocative colour is an Almodovarian trademark. The landscape is hot and arid, much like the homosexual romance that is not allowed to blossom. Instead the two men were forced into a life of uncomfortable conformity, the unfulfilled existence to which the song and the movie title allude.

The movie is filmed in the dusty Tabernas Desert near the Andalusian town of Almeria, a place with a climate and vegetation very similar to the Old West (where the story takes place).

With a fairly predictable ending, Strange Way of Life adds very little to Almodovar’s impressive filmography, except perhaps for a change of language and geography. The message about unrequited domesticity (ie the two men could never live as an ordinary couple) is banal and redundant. Strange Way of Life is some sort of unpretentious Latin tribute to Ang Lee’s Brokeback Mountain (2005). Not a movie that will stay with a you for a long time. Not a waste of your time, either.

Strange Way of Life premiered at the 76th Cannes International Film Festival, when this piece was originally written. The film was out of competition, presumably because of its duration of just 31 minutes. This is the second time the Spanish director has directed an English-language film, the first one being the equally short The Human Voice (three years ago in Venice). Because of its unusual length, the movie is unlikely to see widespread theatrical release. On the other hand, it may find peculiar distribution strategies. Almodovar’s 2020 film was shown in UK cinemas followed by a real-time nationwide Q&A with the Iberian filmmaker and British actress Tilda Swindon.

In cinemas across the UK on Monday, September 25th, presented with a recorded Q&A.

The Human Voice

Posted on by victorfraga

Breaking up with your ex is never an easy task, particularly when he’s already found a new companion. He hasn’t returned home for three days, in a rather unambiguous sign that he has now left for good. You experience a lot of feelings: despondency, jealousy, hate and – first and foremost – rage. You want to stab his chest. You want to cut him up with an axe. You want to set fire to what once was your love nest.

Can you live out these things for real? Probably not a good idea. So the 70-year-old Spanish filmmaker found a cunning solution. He staged the entire action. He built a mock home inside a large warehouse and hired Tilda Swinton to play the jilted lover. She is supported by her doting pooch Dash, dazzling costumes and a jaunty music score by Alberto Iglesias.

Almodovar’s latest movie places a 1928 play by Jean Cocteau in a modern context. Tilda Swinton’s character is surrounded by plush green walls, vibrant furniture, paintings and various art pieces. She is literally dressed to kill, in scarlet red. But what’s most remarkable about the film is how Almodovar opts to expose the cinematic apparatus. Aerial shots reveal that the action takes place inside a film set, in a way vaguely reminiscent of Lars von Trier’s 2003 Dogville (except that the walls are indeed standing, and not merely painted to the ground).

When Tilda’s character speaks to her lover on the telephone, human voice at the other end of the telephone line is never to be heard, not even faintly, emphasising the theatrical nature of the film. Both Tilda and her character are aware that this is all staged action. In fact, the filmic antics overshadow the narrative.

This is not the first time that Almodovar plays with metalanguage. His previous film, the feature Pain and Glory (2019) also foregrounds the filmmaking device. The difference is that here he does it from the very beginning, while in last year’s movie he leaves the clever ruse for a major twist at the very end. The Human Voice obviously has limited commercial ambitions – a 30-minute featurette does not tend to get theatrical distribution -, allowing the filmmaker more artistic freedoms. Or perhaps he’s rehearsing for a more radical experiment in the years to come.

The Human Voice premiered at the 77th Venice International Film Festival, when this piece was originally written. It showed in October at the 64th BFI London Film Festival. It was out in cinemas (featuring a Q&A with Pedro Almodovar and Tilda Swinton, hosted by Mark Kermode) on Wednesday, May 21st. On Mubi on Friday, July 23rd. Also available on other VoD platforms.

Dolor y Gloria

Posted on by victorfraga

The storyline is simply described as “a film director reflects on the choices he’s made in life as past and present come crashing down around him”. The film narrates a series of reencounters of Salvador Mallo, a film director in his decline. Some of these reencounters are physical, some others are remembered: his childhood in the 1960s, when he emigrated together with his family to Valencia in search of prosperity, the first “deseo” (desire), his first adult love In Madrid in the 1980s, the pain of the breakup of this relationship, writing as a therapy to forget, the premature discovery of cinema, and so on.

The Castilian director chose to work with his usual cast: Antonio Banderas, Penelope Cruz, Julieta Serrano and others. His film takes place entirely in Spain, as characters travel back and forth throughout different regions of the country as they grow old. Almodovar once told DMovies that he “he used geographic extremes of Spain in order to emphasise the isolation of the characters”.

You wouldn’t be able to make the story out by watching the film trailer, which is in reality a patchwork of random images from the film. A heavily bearded Antonio Banderas looks like a young Pedro Almodovar, suggesting that the film is indeed highly autobiographical. The inevitable comparison, of course, is Federico Fellini’s 1963 masterpiece 8 1/2. Both films centre on a film director in decline played by an ageing heartthrob from the same country as the real filmmaker (Marcello Maistroianni, in Fellini’s film).

Almodovar has a long history of celebrating filmmaking. Nearly all of his films are teeming with intertext and references to other movies. All About My Mother (1999) is a very explicit reference to All About Eve (Joseph L. Mankiewicz, 1950), with the Hollywood classic shortly played within the film. In Bad Education (2004), Almodovar apparently paid tribute to himself by closing the film with a very clear allusion to his own predicament as a filmmaker. This time he wishes to go even further. Let’s just hope he doesn’t slip into cliches and instead delivers a solid and masterful piece, similar to Julieta (2017).

Dolor y Gloria is scheduled for theatrical release in Spain on Friday, March 22nd. No UK date has been arranged yet.