Strange Way of Life (Extraña forma de vida, Spain-France 2023)

For a second time, Pedro Almodóvar has decided to release a short (31 minute) film rather than a new feature. This production, in association with Saint Laurent the luxury goods company, offers a rather different approach to that for The Human Voice (Spain 2020). This time Almodóvar has decided to write his own genre script rather than rely on adapting an existing work. The film was shot in the desert landscapes of Almería, the location of dozens of European Westerns and, as if to follow the casting decisions of those films, it features Ethan Hawke as an imported American star opposite Pedro Pascal, a Chilean actor who has starred in various US TV series that I have never seen. Scouring IMDb credits lists suggests I might once have seen him in a bit part in a 2011 US film. The rest of the cast seems to comprise Spanish or other European actors. The dialogue is mainly in English with some Spanish. Almodóvar has previously said that he has worries about making films in English, but in this case perhaps the English of the European Western is not so precious. The short even has an opening song, like many classic Westerns, except it is in Spanish and not translated in subtitles (it seems to just introduce the film’s title?). The singer is a young man who sings in a high register: Frankie Lane, he isn’t.

The creative team on the film comprises Almodóvar regulars but their work here produces something that looks and sounds like a kind of halfway house between an American and a European Western. The music by Alberto Iglesias is high quality as usual but didn’t strike me as ‘Western’ – whether American or European. The two most striking images in the film for me were firstly the colours the two principals wear in the opening sequence – a green jacket for Silva (Pascal) and a red waistcoat for Jake (Hawke) and secondly the immaculately laundered and folded underwear in Jake’s chest of drawers (!) when he invites Pascal to take a clean pair. Other than that the mise en scène and camerawork are familiar from the hundreds of Western narratives I’ve watched. The film is presented in ‘Scope and includes the kinds of big close-ups familiar from Italian Westerns. The only other element that is alluded to is Almodóvar’s comment about trying to make a version of the Brokeback Mountain story that has appeared in various interviews.

I have no problem with Pedro taking on Brokeback. He has after all re-imagined short stories and novels by authors such as Ruth Rendell (Live Flesh, 1997) and Alice Munro (Julieta, 2016). But both of those adaptations were in Spanish and taking on Annie Proulx and Larry McMurtry as writers is a brave move if you are making a Western, even a European Western. In Pedro’s queer Western we get some fetching bare buttocks and quite a few very beautiful young men in supporting roles (including younger versions of the the two central characters) but I think that the short running time is a problem for a complex narrative. I’m not going to spoil the narrative we get except to say that it involves a very close connection between three men, each of whom has a gun. Of course, Western TV series in the 1950s and 1960s often had only 25 or 30 minutes or so to tell a story and they managed it very well – although the stories could include narrative material that rolled out over a whole series of shows.

One writer who could certainly write 25-30 minute shows was Sam Peckinpah with The Rifleman (1958-9) for Chuck Connors and The Westerner (1960) for Brian Keith. Ironically, there is a strong link in Almodóvar’s story to the characterisation of the two central characters in Peckinpah’s 1962 masterpiece Ride the High Country featuring Randolph Scott and Joel McCrea as two ageing gunmen who meet after several years and realise they have taken different paths. Jake and Silva have followed a similar trajectory and are now raking over their past relationship. The difference is that they were lovers all that time ago. There is also another scene that reminded me of The Wild Bunch (1969) and possibly of A Fistful of Dollars (1964).

I guess that Almodóvar is doing something different in the sense that he does at least raise the issue of what might happen if two men lived together as lovers in a Western – as must have happened in the historical West. I just wish he’d made a longer narrative with space to explore what might happen between the two men. As it is, this feels like an episode in a long-form narrative series. I did enjoy watching this short film and I would watch something longer. Strange Way of Life is currently streaming on MUBI in the UK. It is also available to rent, rather/buy at quite a high price from Amazon and Apple amongst others.  It looks like it had a cinema outing of some kind in September in the UK. I’d like to have included the trailer but since it gives away every aspect of what little plot there is, I decided against it.