Spanish legend Pedro Almodovar will be back at Cannes this May with his Strange Way of Life. This will be a world premiere – like every title at the Festival – and will play in the official sections. We do not know whether it would be part of the top Competition slot or A Certain Regard. Cannes also has a couple of more categories – Special Screenings and Midnight Screenings.
The main cast of Strange Way of Life, Ethan Hawke and Pedro Pascal, would attend the screening and walk the Red Carpet. The movie is Almodovar’s second work in English after The Human Voice (2020). A conversation will follow the film.
What is it all about? Almodovar said in a note: “A man rides a horse across the desert that separates him from Bitter Creek. He comes to visit Sheriff Jake. Twenty-five years earlier, both the Sheriff and Silva, the rancher who rides out to meet him, worked together as hired gunmen. Silva visits him with the excuse of reuniting with his friend from his youth, and they do indeed celebrate their meeting, but the next morning Silva tells Jake that the reason for his trip is not to go down the memory lane of their old friendship…I must say no more so as not to give away all the surprises of the script”.
The title, Strange Way of Life, alludes to the famous Fado by Amalia Rodrigues, whose lyrics suggest that there is no stranger existence than the one that is lived by turning your back on your own desires.
Almodovar’s career has been magical. He said in his biographical book, Almodovar on Almodovar, that “ I attempted all genres in my movies. Quite a few of them were influenced by Cecil De Mille’s biblical epics.”.
In his very first work in 1980, Pepi, Luci, Bom and Other Girls Like Mom, he presents all the vitality, plurality, and emancipation that characterise the post-Franco Spanish society. It was with Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown in 1988 that he became popular with the masses. With a resolutely sensitive cinema, he has always provoked his viewers to question his work which spoke about universal themes of love, desire, childhood, and motherhood.
And, mind you, he has always placed women at the centre of all his films. He once said that his mother and sisters had been a great influence on him, and his cinema reflected this in no uncertain terms. Two titles that are so representative of this are All About My Mother in 1999 and Volver (2006) in which Penelope Cruz gives a brilliant performance. Cannes gave him the Best Director Award for the first. The second got him the Best Screenplay Statuette.
The director chaired the 2017 jury and awarded the Festival’s top prize to The Square by Ruben Ostlund, who will preside over the jury this year. Two years later, Almodovar came to Cannes with Pain and Glory in which Antonio Banderas’ deeply moving performance earned him the Best Actor Prize. The film was almost biographical referring to the pleasures and angst of the helmer.
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