Hundreds of people wanted to see Spanish director Pedro Almodóvar’s half-hour Western film at the Cannes festival, in which Hollywood stars Ethan Hawke and Pedro Pascal play lovers. Spectators waited in line for over an hour despite the rain, but the organizers still had to turn away a lot of them. All the more than 1,000 seats in the hall were occupied.
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The short film Strange Way of Life directed by Pedro Almodóvar does not yet have a Czech distributor. | Video: Pathe UK
“This is the best place in the world right now,” Almodóvar said at the start of the world premiere. “You are the first to see my new film. You are the first to react to it. And we are nervous about it, but excited at the same time,” he added.
The new short film by the seventy-three-year-old filmmaker, who became famous for his long Spanish-language films mainly about women, is called Extraña forma de vida, or Strange Way of Life in English. She was inspired by westerns with Clint Eastwood and the Oscar-winning gay romance Taming of the Shrew from 2005, which Almodóvar was originally supposed to shoot before he turned down the project, the New York Times reports.
The director presented the film in Cannes with the participation of the entire crew except for Pedro Pascal. The 48-year-old star of the series The Last of Us or The Mandalorian apologized for participating, according to unverified reports, he is currently filming the sequel to the historical blockbuster Gladiator with director Ridley Scott.
The premiere in Cannes was sponsored by the French fashion house Yves Saint Laurent, in addition to Almodóvar and actor Ethan Hawke, the twenty-four-year-old actor and singer Manu Ríos, known from the teenage series Elita, stood on stage.
In the new film, Ethan Hawke plays Sheriff Jake, who investigates a murder, Pascal played the Mexican rancher Silva. These former lovers meet again after 25 years when Silva arrives in a small town called Bitter Creek. They have dinner together, open a bottle of wine and discover that the mutual attraction between them has not cooled. However, a new obstacle stands in her way.
Pedro Pascal as Silva and Ethan Hawke as Jake. | Photo: Iglesias Más
Critics have received the film with enthusiasm, according to them it respects the western genre and at the same time adds something new to it. According to the British newspaper Guardian and Vanity Fair magazine, it is possible to imagine that Almodóvar would supplement the narrative with a feature-length footage. The film is characterized by a strong and well-told story, the critic of the Guardian wrote and awarded it four out of five stars.
The New York Times notes that the story is unusually chaste by Almodóvar’s standards. “The sexual tension in my films comes from the looks. So from the beginning I was determined not to include a full-fledged sex scene in Strange Way of Life,” responded Almodóvar, according to whom the actors reveal more in conversation with each other than if they shed their clothes.
In his 2019 feature Pain and Glory, Antonio Banderas portrayed a film director. The character was apparently partly autobiographical, notes Almodóvar in retrospect.
He says that after he turned 70, he became more interested in the stories of gay men recapitulating their lives. “I think it’s also a reflection of my aging, the fact that I started telling stories about older men,” he admits. “If I wrote this western when I was twenty-five, the heroes are probably twenty-five too,” he adds.
During the pandemic, Pedro Almodóvar already created the short film La voz humana, in English The Human Voice, in which the well-known actress Tilda Swinton acted. He filmed the new movie in the surroundings of the Spanish port city of Almería, where director Sergio Leone created his famous trilogy of spaghetti westerns from the 1960s with Clint Eastwood. The crew worked despite the record heat wave.
