Pedro Almodóvar’s Queer Cowboy Movie Starring Pedro Pascal Is Now Streaming on Netflix

Pathe UK 

Pedro Almodóvar’s long-anticipated gay Western film, starring Pedro Pascal and Ethan Hawke, is finally coming to a screen near you.

Strange Way of Life, which premiered at the Cannes Film Festival last year followed by a limited theatrical release, is available for streaming on Netflix as of today. Almodóvar has described the 30-minute film as his “answer to Brokeback Mountain,” and the vibes definitely seem to match, judging from the trailer.

Pascal and Hawke play Silva and Sheriff Jake, former lovers who reunite after 25 years apart. But true to the bittersweet nature of Brokeback Mountain, the reunion isn’t quite a happy one: It just so happens that Sheriff Jake’s sister-in-law has been murdered, and it’s now his personal mission to arrest the killer.

Almodóvar told Variety last year that Strange Way of Life “is a queer western in the sense that there are two men, and they love each other, and they behave in that situation in an opposite way.”

“Cowboys Are Frequently Secretly Fond of Each Other” is a rousing queer ode.

“What I can tell you about the film is that it has a lot of the elements of the Western. It has the gunslinger. It has the ranch. It has the sheriff,” the director continued. “But what it has that most Westerns don’t have is the kind of dialogue that I don’t think a Western film has ever captured between two men. And now I think I’m telling you too much.”

Of course, Westerns have always been tinged with homoerotic subtext, as Willie Nelson and Orville Peck recently noted with their cover of “Cowboys Are Frequently, Secretly Fond of Each Other.” It seems as though Almodóvar is saying that he’s making that homoerotic subtext into text, which is the kind of yee-haw agenda we can get on board with.

Pascal also spoke about the experience of working with the legendary director in an interview with Insider last year. “It could have been anything that [Almodóvar] asked me to do, and I would have done it without question,” he told the publication. “He absolutely opened up an entire world of storytelling, color, culture, rebellion, and sexuality that was just absolutely intoxicating, dangerous, hilarious, heartbreaking, and encompassing the whole spectrum, but with such a signature style.”

BRB, running to throw Strange Way of Life on the TV as we speak.

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Originally Appeared on them.