Many filmmakers who experience outsized success in a non-American country try their hand at a Hollywood production or two — to decidedly mixed results. Across 22 features, Spanish icon of melodrama and queer cinema Pedro Almódovar has resisted this maneuver, and in the process maintained a stylistic consistency and integrity that leaves little room for one to wish he tried something in English. In two recent short films, however, he has quietly made inroads toward a possible future English language feature debut. 2020’s The Human Voice, a Tilda Swinton one woman show, was his first movie of any length in English, and this year’s 30-minute western Strange Way of Life is his second.
The film, which premiered at Cannes in May, is predicated on the reunion of two “cowboys”: former friends and lovers Jake (Ethan Hawke) and Silva (Pedro Pascal). They’re mostly cowboys in iconography only: Jake is a sheriff and Silva an outlaw living out in the desert. The latter rides into Bitter Lake, a frontier town, after 25 years under the guise of having a back ailment that needs medical attention, for which he counsels the help of his old companion. Or is his return because he wants to dig his feet into the stirrups of a reliable steed he used to ride (so to speak)? Or, something beyond that further still? Jake welcomes him in with soup and red wine and eventually takes him to bed but is suspicious the next morning.
The conversation the two men have when they wake hints at several details from the long, complicated and intwined history Jake and Silva share, and if this was a typical Almódovar feature, we would no doubt be entreated to copious flashbacks (here we get one), multiple double-crosses and countless layers of deception that have to be pulled back. His plots are labyrinthine but always in a way that’s innately tied to characters’ traumas and emotional development. The Human Voice and Strange Way of Life instead merely hint at untapped characters’ biographies and unexplored narratives that one would have faith Almódovar could gleefully unspool if he wanted to.
Yet The Human Voice felt belabored and too long even at just half an hour, while Strange Way of Life is something of a tease—it ends abruptly and you can easily see it being at least 15 minutes longer, if not just beefed up to feature length. Hawke and Pascal’s polar energies make for an engaging dynamic and the predicament the film draws the curtain on begs for some more resolution, and not in a gratifyingly ambiguous way. It feels caught between development stages, as if funding was suddenly yanked on what was meant to be a full-scale film.
Still, Strange Way of Life is an amusing meditation on the cosplay of masculinity and the Old West. One of Pascal’s first comments to Hawke is to regard his outfit with a kind of put-on appreciation and note that he is “dressed as a sheriff,” to which Hawke delightfully retorts that he “isn’t just dressed as one.” Almódovar is constantly calling our attention to the artificial costumes of the Old West — the film wasn’t even shot in the U.S., but rather entirely filmed in Spain, and the director, cinematographer José Luis Alcaine and production designer Antxón Gómez make no efforts to conceal that. Pascal’s vibrant green jacket he wears upon riding into town is another statement piece that keys us into what the filmmakers are getting at, as is Hawke’s performance; when he’s on guard and stifling his vulnerability, he speaks entirely in overdetermined gruff whispers. We can feel his character, in a pretty tragic way, straining desperately to cover up who he really is in those moments. One can’t escape the feeling though, that as powerful as moments like these are, their tragedy could be amplified by having a little bit more screen time and room to breathe.
Photo courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics
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