So About That Gay Cowboy Movie Starring Pedro Pascal and Ethan Hawke…
Pedro Pascal is going to see a man about a horse. Actually, you can scratch the “about a horse” part.
Riding the range in the Wild, Wild West, his cowboy rides into town, hitches his stallion, and walks right into the sheriff’s office. The lawman — he’s named Jake, and played by Ethan Hawke — knows this stranger, Silva. The two lock eyes, and the faintest of smiles breaks across Jake’s face. They knew each other, a long, long time ago. The duo decide to catch up over a drink. Silva reminds his old friend that they used to a drink a lot together, back in the day. Jake says he doesn’t drink any more. It led to too much “madness.” Silva says it wasn’t mad at all. They stare into each other’s eyes some more. The temperature in the frontier jailhouse seems to be rising. Get a room, you two!
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Except they’ve already got one, what with a bed being right over there and all, and the outlaw is slugging whiskey and the sheriff is looking over his friend with the most lustful of looks. Jake comes up behind Silva and kisses him on the neck. Both are in ecstasy. Fade to black.
Pedro Almodóvar’s Strange Way of Life is what happens when a master filmmaker remembers a line from a famous film he passed on making — “What would two men do in the West, working on a ranch?” — and decides to finally gift us with his version of Brokeback Mountain. Starring the guy from The Mandolorian and one half of the Before Sunrise duo. Produced by the creative director of Saint Laurent. Filmed on the same Spanish plains as The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. As a 30-minute short. Perhaps there is a God after all.
Actually, this gloriously, unabashedly romantic Western from the Spanish filmmaker is more of an answer to Ang Lee’s Oscar-nominated touchstone than a cover version, and concise length or not, the perfect movie to premiere at Cannes: sumptuously cinematic, purposefully cine-meta, something that simultaneously breaks new ground and builds on the back catalog of a major world-cinema player. It’s also curiously restrained for Almodóvar, who never met a transgression he didn’t like and once opened a movie with a man masturbating to a slasher flick. The costumes by Saint Laurent’s Anthony Vaccarello are indeed chic, but they aren’t campy; the color palette here never goes full metal Skittles. Almodóvar has dabbled in short form before, with the bona fide Tilda-Swinton-goes-apeshit masterpiece The Human Voice, but he’s never tried his hand at a Western. Like his earlier short, it’s in English, and starring the sort of handsome, fan-favorite actors that suggest he’s about to inspire a thousand ‘shipping fan-fiction short stories.
It’s a provocative movie that brings out the best in both of its leads, and feels like the filmmaker is having fun playing around with these genre tropes, even if he’s not being the least bit ironic in his use of them. (Tongues in mouths? Yes. Tongue-in-cheek? Not really, nope.) The only problem with Strange Way of Life, in fact, is that it’s over before it’s even begun. Almodóvar has given these characters such a rich backstory and a strong sense of motivation (there’s a conflict between the two men that involves family, duty and murder), as well as creating such an evocative world for them to play in, that you curse the fact that he didn’t make this his next feature. He may have only needed 30 minutes to tell this story, yet he leaves you wanting four times as more. Sony Picture Classics is releasing this in the fall, hopefully at a theater near you. And hopefully, this is a taste of something bigger, bolder, and even more Brokeback by Pedro to come.
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