JUST when you thought you knew what to expect from 'an Almodóvar film', the cult director from Castilla-La Mancha serves up something completely off the menu – and it's getting to the stage where there are few cinema genres left he hasn't dabbled in.
Ethan Hawke (left), shown here in the 2022 production Moon Knight, is due to star in Pedro Almodóvar's next film (photo: IMDb)
Nowadays, newcomers to Pedro Almodóvar's works and with little knowledge of Spanish cultural and societal background would find the first decade or so of his films to be alarming, unsettling and perhaps OTT – but the melodrama, hypersexualised plots, characters and scenes, and overall no-holds-barred flamboyance are a valuable piece of artistic history: From his début Pepa, Luci, Bom in 1980 through kitsch and off-the-wall productions such as The Law of Desire, High Heels, Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!, Kika, and Live Flesh – the latter based upon the Ruth Rendell novel – the most international of Spain's film-makers was a leading light in the 10 or 15 years following the death of dictator General Franco, whose extreme and rigid censorship of media, literature, music and cinema went to the grave with him and gave industry figures free rein to go completely the other way.
Later works gradually became more introspective, darker in some cases, dealing with existential crises, ethical debates, troubled relationships, and family dynamics – including the semi-autobiographical multiple Goya-winning Dolor y Gloria (Pain and Glory), starring Antonio Banderas – albeit with a bit of comic relief thrown in now and again, such as in I'm So Excited (Amantes Pasajeros in the original), taking place entirely inside a passenger aircraft.
Almodóvar's 'lockdown film', a 15-minute short based upon Les Enfants Terribles' Jean Cocteau's story The Human Voice, was his first production entirely in English and with just one cast member – British-Australian actress and former schoolmate of Princess Diana, Tilda Swinton.
Pedro Almodóvar (left) and Tilda Swinton, who starred in the cult director's first-ever English-language film, The Human Voice
His second English-language film, and the first full-length non-Spanish feature, will be an adaptation of Lucia Berlin's short story collection Manual for Cleaning Women, with Aussie legend Cate Blanchett tipped to be one of the lead players.
So, what does he have up his sleeve this time?
Sci-Fi? Cop-chase crime thrillers? A Mediaeval costume drama? A Christmassy rom-com starring Hugh Grant? Something for kids?
A side-order of short-ish spaghetti
Neither a full film nor a short, but somewhere in between, with a Spanish- and English-speaking cast, a sort-of literary adaptation, a romance, but above all, a western, are the next big thing for the scriptwriter from Calzada de Calatrava (Ciudad Real province).
Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal in Brokeback Mountain, which Almodóvar's film is said to be a ‘response to’ (photo: IMDb)
IndieWire has described the 30-minute production as a raunchier version of Brokeback Mountain, which Almodóvar narrowly missed directing.
In the end, the screen version of Annie Proulx's cowboy romance was created by Ang Lee, but Almodóvar said if he had been behind it in the end, it 'would have had a lot more sex in it'.
And where better to portray the American West than in Spain's south-east?
Decades after Almería's Tabernas desert was the almost-constant backdrop to spaghetti westerns and most local jobs were in the film industry, Almodóvar is looking to use the old sets again, recreating the atmosphere presented to a whole generation of cinema fans by the likes of Sergio Leone.
Nowadays, the Wild West villages and their arid scenery, which passed as US cowboy country, are among Almería province's most popular tourist attractions, and guided tours run to them regularly.
The film set for El Cóndor (1970) in Almería's Tabernas desert (photo: Jaime Cantero Dole/Wikimedia Commons)
And they're about to be revived through the semi-tragic Extraña Forma de Vida ('Strange Way of Life'), which takes its name from a song title.
Amália Rodrigues' fado – or Portuguese folk song – will be part of the soundtrack and is, according to the director, 'a sad song' which 'sums up the way these guys live'.
'These guys' are two cowboys, one a sheriff – Ethan Hawke – and Pedro Pascal, one-time lovers who live at opposite ends of the desert and which they have to cross to find each other again.
Portuguese fado singer Amália Rodrigues, pictured in 1969. Her song Estranha Forma de Vida ('Strange Way of Life') gives the film its title, and will be part of the soundtrack (photo: Wikimedia Commons)
A co-production with the firm Saint Laurent, it is likely the latter's designer Anthony Vaccarello will be in charge of costume creation.
Filming is due to start this summer, according to IndieWire.
All Almería's an Almodóvar stage
Westerns aside, the Andalucía province bathed by the Alborán Sea and directly due north of the Algerian coast has long been a favourite with location scouts.
The raw, rugged Mónsul beach was used for a key scene in the early 1980s' children's epic The Neverending Story, as well as for Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade with Harrison Ford and Sean Connery – who also filmed scenes there for The Wind and the Lion in 1975 – and it also served Almodóvar in his 2002 Hable Con Ella ('Talk to Her'), where this stretch of coast passed as the shores of the Red Sea in Egypt.
Agua Amarga, Almería province, where scenes from Almodóvar's Labyrinth of Passion were filmed (photo: Ziegler175/Wikimedia Commons)
Now 40 years ago, scenes from the Spanish film legend's Laberinto de Pasiones ('Labyrinth of Passion') were created in the picturesque white hilltop municipality of Mojácar, and on the beach of the village of Agua Amarga in the Cabo de Gata-Níjar nature reserve, one of a handful of delectable coastal locations in Spain with fewer than 1,000 inhabitants.
