Almodóvar leaves Madrid, but stays in the region. The director from La Mancha, who has so often paid tribute to Madrid in his films -as the current exhibition Madrid, chica Almodóvar portrays- premiered on Monday at the Venice Film Festival his first film shot in English: The Next Room. The success of the reception among the specialized audience is measured in applause:seventeen minutes of ovation.
We will have to wait until October 18 to applaud and to see what area of Madrid has moved. The magazine Manera Magazine reports, however, that Pedro Almodóvar (and his location team) set his sights on a “single-family house with cubic profiles” near El Escorial called the Szoke House.
An American house in Madrid
The house, which was built by the studio Aranguren + Gallegos between 2018 and 2020, is integrated into the native flora (Monte Abantos) and is considered an example of environmentally friendly architecture. A native flora or an environment, on the other hand, that simulates that of Woodstock, despite being the north of Madrid.
Almodóvar justifies filming in a non-US location in an interview with Elsa Fernández-Santos in El País Semanal: “If the Russian steppe of Doctor Zhivago could be filmed next door, I say that a contemporary melodrama can also be shot here”. And Inbal Weinberg, art director, adds: “We have worked the vegetation so that it is like the top of New York State in May, flowery and lustrous”.
When Almodóvar talks about the house he does so in these terms: “We were lucky to find a house with those trapeze-shaped windows that almost look like something out of a horror movie. I didn’t mean to, but it came out that way…“.
Almodóvar’s new film
The Szoke House enjoys high prominence in the trailer for a film based on a novel by writer Sigrid Nuñez published in Spanish by Anagrama and titled Cuál es tu tormento. Starring Tilda Swinton and Julianne Mooore, the film tells how a friend visits another who suffers from terminal cancer and, due to the bad relationship she has with her daughter, the friend decides to move in with her to accompany her in her last days.