CULT film director Pedro Almodóvar is about to produce his first-ever full-length feature film entirely in English, starring Australian double-Oscar-winning actress Cate Blanchett.
Spain's most famous film director Pedro Almodóvar at the 2019 Goya Awards, right (photo: Wikimedia Commons) and Australian actress Cate Blanchett at Cannes Film Festival in 2018, when she was chairwoman of the judges' panel, left (photo: Joan Hernández Mir/Wikimedia Commons)
Following on from the success of his short film The Human Voice, based upon the novella of the same name by Les Enfants Terribles author Jean Cocteau, the veteran Castilla-La Mancha-born scriptwriter and director will now take the plunge with a mainstream production in a foreign language for the first time in his 40-year career.
Unlike The Human Voice, where British-Australian Cambridge graduate Tilda Swinton was the sole cast member, Almodóvar's future project will involve a multiple largely-female cast, including Ms Blanchett herself, whose production company Dirty Films has reportedly obtained the screen rights to the late Lucia Berlin's bestselling short story collection Manual for Cleaning Women.
Published posthumously, 11 years after Lucía Berlin's death from lung cancer on her 68th birthday in 2004, this collection of 43 short stories – the author's fourth compilation, three of which were released in her lifetime – focuses on real-life struggles faced by ladies in menial, thankless jobs, and reflects Ms Berlin's own turbulent life.
Born in Juneau, Alaska, growing up in Chile – where she frequented high society and attended private school – married at 17, divorced three times by 30 and with four children, with a degree from the University of Colorado which meant she was 'treated with reticence and suspicion' when applying for jobs as a cleaner, Lucia Berlin suffered from alcoholism, as did her mother before her, which affected her health long-term just as her life was beginning to reach an even keel after she became a much-adored professor and visiting writer at her alma mater college.
Almodóvar had already talked seriously of adapting Lucia Berlin's most famous work to screen in English, even before he had started filming with Tilda Swinton, and in fact, had originally intended for his recently-released Julieta to be in the language, but the adaptation rights had expired before it was created.
Although the vehicular language of Manual for Cleaning Women will be English, many scenes will involve dialogue in Spanish, given the huge population of Latin American-born residents in the USA and the fact that they feature throughout Lucia Berlin's original text.
Cate Blanchett, 52, who won a Best Supporting Actress Oscar in 2005 for her rôle in The Aviator and a Best Actress Oscar in 2014 for Blue Jasmine, as well as a Golden Globe and a BAFTA in 1999 for Elizabeth and the former in 2008 for I'm Not There, has a cameo part in the recently-released Don't Look Up and is about to hit Spanish screens again this month in Guillermo del Toro's Nightmare Alley as Dr Lilith Ritter.
Joint artistic director of Sydney Theatre Company along with her husband Andrew Upton, born in Melbourne and with a drama degree from Sydney, now living in Crowborough, East Sussex, UK, Cate's long career has included numerous literary adaptations, from Charlotte Gray and Notes on a Scandal to Patricia Highsmith's Carol and Where d'you go, Bernadette, encompassing Lord of the Rings and F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Curious Case of Benjamin Button.
She reportedly contacted Almodóvar as soon as her company had acquired the rights to Lucia Berlin's book, always having had him in mind as director.
As yet, details of the cast and when filming is due to start are not known, but it is expected news on both will follow in the early part of 2022.
