After the lukewarm opening film -- Maiwenn's Jeanne Du Barry, a fluffy costume drama starring Johnny Depp as King Louis XV -- the 76th Cannes Film Festival had its hottest ticket in a short film. Not just any short though: it's Pedro Almodovar's queer cowboy movie Strange Way Of Life, which saw patient festival-goers queuing up in the Rivera drizzle for nearly an hour to fill up even the worst seat of Salle Debussy on Wednesday.
Was it worth it? With a little stretch, yes. Probably because after the insipid opening film, people were just ready to grasp at anything to build the momentum of the festival, and Almodovar's stylish, fashionably grizzled 30-minute film and a belated (very much so) answer to Brokeback Mountain fit the bill just fine.
The two leads anchor the film in that unusual pocket of queer Western. Ethan Hawke and Pedro Pascal, the latter fresh from his breakout hit The Last Of Us, play two gruff cowboys somewhere in the Old West, baked by the sun and unmoored by a romantic past. Hawke is Sheriff Jake, a lawman who's investigating the murder of a woman who's also his late brother's wife; Pascal is Silva, a rancher who, as the film opens, rides across the desert with a hidden agenda to meet Jake.
Silva claims to have a bad backache and is in town to see a doctor. But as soon as the two men look in each other's eyes, the old fire is rekindled and the bedsheet is soon crumpled by their reunion.
"So you don't have a bad back," Sheriff Jake contends, and that's enough of an innuendo without Almodovar having to show Hawke and Pascal in any position more than a smothering embrace. Yes, it turns out that Silva has another motive in seeking out Sheriff Jake after two decades of absence -- and that motive is tangled up with the murder Jake is trying to solve.
Strange Way Of Life has such a promising setup and convincing characters that it's a shame Almodovar treats it merely as an exercise. There's a gunfight, a betrayal and a test of loyalty -- but everything is crammed pretty hastily into 30 minutes when the director could have done more to make it fuller and more complete. The Western is probably the most masculine genre in cinema, and Almodovar both honours that tradition while also toying with the idea of masculinity. For all its promises, Strange Way Of Life is at best a pilot project and a chic Saint Laurent commercial with the two actors as models (yes, the film was financed by the French fashion brand).
On a related note, another surprise packed screening on Wednesday was in the Cannes Classics section. The film was Caligula: The Ultimate Cut, a new, 157-minute re-imagining of the notorious 1980 film bankrolled by Penthouse mogul Bob Guccicone. One critic called the film "a moral holocaust", which seems like a perfect blurb in 2023.
The new cut is brought to Cannes by producer Thomas Negovan, who scoured through 90 hours of footage and oversaw the re-editing of the film that supposedly fits the original intention of the director Tinto Brass, who asked for his name to be removed from the film when it was originally released.
Caligula: The Ultimate Cut is expected to have a limited release in many territories due to the original film's legendary status and its ambition to mix "art and porn" in one lurid package.
Here, we have Shakespearan drama backgrounded by orgiastic copulation and a lot of penises, with Peter O'Toole in his full mad emperor mode, Malcolm McDowell as the wild-eyed, sadistic Caligula, and Helen Mirren, either naked or clothed by sheer Roman fabric, as his plotting courtesan. It's a film you can't imagine anyone making now, or ever. We can't hope for someone to bring this to Thailand, but at least you now know the film exists in this world.
Cannes Film Festival will run until May 27. See more reports from Cannes in Life next week.
