Pedro Almodóvar doesn’t take long to repair the cultural confusion caused by Brokeback Mountain, that largely forgotten 2004 conversation piece widely known as the “gay cowboy” movie. In his new 30-minute short, Strange Way of Life, he corrects the delusions by which mainstream media paraded its superficial, dishonest acceptance of homosexuality. Nearly 20 years later, Spanish auteur Almodóvar, admired for the resplendent sex comedies Law of Desire, Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, The Skin I Live In, and Pain and Glory, sets the sexual record straight, so to speak.
The simple plot of Strange Way of Life is a love story, set in the Old West — not the phony Middle America that was the basis of Brokeback Mountain’s tendentious political correctness. Almodóvar goes back in history to romanticize it: Mexican rancher Silva (Pedro Pascal) rides into Bitter Creek and pleads for the life of his outlaw son to Sheriff Jake (Ethan Hawke), who is obligated to arrest the rascal. The situation is fraught, combining the men’s moral choice with the debt of longtime friendship. It’s essentially an emotional reunion. Silva and Jake share a passionate history that each man forsook, yet never forgot — despite moving on to heterosexual marriage and lifestyles.
Their 25-year anniversary owes to fate and practical necessity; Almodóvar avoids Brokeback Mountain’s bogus surprise lust. Flashbacks disclose Silva and Jack’s young and crazy past through a bit of cinematic legerdemain: A drunken, dissolute barrier-busting orgy with whores and wine that reenacts a bawdy scene from Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch. Almodóvar’s personal fantasy reinterprets that classic film, enough to seem genuine.
How else could a serious European artist react to a genre as quintessentially American as the Western without imbuing it with sexual fancy, yet not neglecting his own moral commitment? In Brokeback Mountain, director Ang Lee won his first Oscar for mixing the illicit and the romantic — a slightly dishonest ploy. But Almodóvar brings European sophistication to the Western genre to express Silva’s and Jake’s consciousness. (Silva’s red scarf is a memento Jake keeps in an underwear drawer, an erotic metaphor as explicit as Max Ophuls’s The Earrings of Madame de . . . )
Almodóvar’s artistry crosses hetero and homo barriers. Strange Way of Life is erudite and universal, as was his 2020 short adaptation of Jean Cocteau’s The Human Voice that starred Tilda Swinton. The Human Voice — the classic theater monologue — was always a touchstone for Almodóvar, frequently referenced in many of his films. Here he gives voice (plus the visual expanse of the Western) to the gay male passion that was faked by Brokeback Mountain’s pseudo-progressivism.
The important, humanist point made in Strange Way of Life comes through Almodóvar’s understanding that the Western genre forged recognizable — international — cinema lingo. The film opens with a lonely cowboy (Millennial heartthrob Manu Ríos) singing fado, the Portuguese song of longing and melancholy. That female karaoke voice (it is Amalia Rodrigues) coming out of a young Mexican male evokes the bold, sexual breakthroughs of Mexico’s great auteur Julián Hernández, especially his recent short Cobalto and feature-length The Trace of Your Lips — movies so original that they scare off gatekeepers at American film festivals. In Parallel Mothers (2021), Almodóvar showed conventional leftist partisanship, but Strange Way of Life, like fado, goes deeper than slogans on a pride-parade placard. Almodóvar uses the good will he has earned to transcend political correctness.
Realizing the impossibility of social acceptance, Silva and Jake ask each other, “What can two men on a ranch do?” Their answer, “Look after each other / Protect each other / Keep each other company,” is lyrical, the essence of love and compassion that no dogma can deny. It extends the frankness and forgiveness portrayed in Pain and Glory between Antonio Banderas and Leonardo Sbaraglia. Pascal and Hawke, both eccentric character actors, complicate the straight-arrow conflicts of Peckinpah icons Joel McCrea and Randolph Scott (Ride the High Country), who might never have dared the physical intimacy Almodóvar envisions. Strange Way of Life is Almodóvar’s first Western and his most profound treatise on love, stated as a way of life.