Independent heart / heart that does not command: / you live lost among the people, / stubbornly bleeding.
only in a movie Pedro Almodovar the protagonist is presented to us on the screen to the sound of a torn fado. In ‘strange way of lifehis peculiar and moving approach to the western genre, premiered in Special Screenings of the 2023 Cannes Film Festival, a beautiful cowboy (Manu Ríos) puts Caetano Veloso’s version of Amália Rodrigues’s fado on his lips, which gives the short film its title. His velvety voice, in the middle of a Western town, raises the curtain so that Pedro Pascal, in the role of Silva, enters the scene as no gunman has ever entered the cinema.
‘Strange way of life’, yes, it leaves us with honey on our lips, because this piece that deconstructs the western, with some captivating Ethan Hawke and Pedro Pascal it’s a iconoclastic work with the genre and continuity with the universe of Almodóvar. Two worlds that have brilliantly collided and hopefully continue to shake each other so that more stories like this germinate.
Almodóvar’s short film tells, in fact, the story of a collision, that of its protagonists, who carry within themselves the two drives that Almodóvar has been working on throughout his filmography: law and desire. The first concept has the face of a straight and icy Ethan Hawke, Sheriff Jack, while the second is embodied by a Seductive, carnal Pedro Pascal with an ace up his sleeve.
Welcome to the Almodovarian western
If the western has taught us anything throughout its long history, it is that every time an outsider arrives in a western outpost, the desert dust kicks up and bullets whistle everywhere. Almodóvar adheres to the narrative conventions of the genre in this short that explains, in effect, the arrival of a stranger –Silva has not seen his old friend Jack for 25 years–, but that is tinged with the idiosyncrasy that has made Manchego a highly acclaimed filmmaker everywhere and, as we have seen, and especially in Cannes.
Vivid colors, a new exquisite production design, the work of esther garcia, and a simple, adequate and elegant wardrobe, lent for the occasion by Saint Laurent and Anthony Vaccarello, creative director of the French firm (producer of the piece), are some of the hallmarks that the Manchego filmmaker modulates in his latest work . All in a scenario that, as the canon dictates, surrenders to the rugged and dusty landscape.
It is true that the fight scenes and the dueling are filmed here in a disruptive way, as well as that the game of lenses and scales often confuses or that at times the score of Alberto Iglesias it overshadows some important scenes. It doesn’t matter, because ‘Strange Way of Life’ surrenders to love and fury, to the emotions of two men intimately linked by a secret love who meet face to face in an “orgiastic night” to answer one of the questions of this genre defined, without a doubt, by its masculinity.
Almodóvar’s response to ‘Brokeback Mountain’ and his criticism of ‘Yellowstone’
Is ‘Strange Way of Life’ an answer to one of the key questions Ennis and Jack asked themselves in ‘Brokeback Mountain’, Ang Lee’s gay cowboy classic? For Pedro Almodóvar there is no doubt and he confesses that the character played by Pedro Pascal dialogues with that of Heath Ledger. The Manchego affirms that his short celebrates, by exposing it, the underlying homoeroticism in cowboy stories that have fed so much the history of cinema.
In the talk in the Debussy room of the Palais des Festivals that followed the premiere of the work, the filmmaker made it clear that when he came up with the work he had this question in mind. The short, however, “is separate from other films, separate from other Westerns, separate from what we call a European Western that begins with Leone and changed the rules of the game.” ‘Strange way of life’ is, in the words of Almodóvar, a western “in my own way”.
No wonder the director cites the recent westerns by three female directors Anglo-Saxon –’The Rider’, by Chloé Zhao; ‘First Cow’, by Kelly Reichardt; and ‘The Power of the Dog’, by Jane Campion– as some of the titles of the genre that have most attracted his attention. By contrast, cathodic works like ‘Yellowstone,’ starring Kevin Costner, remind you of a kind of western.”more traditional, in the worst sense of the term”.
Purists, it is clear, will not get along with ‘Strange way of life’, but those who are not afraid of the most creative Almodóvar will enjoy this new jewel and moving triple jump without a net by the man from La Mancha. A triumph in Cannes.
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