Strange Way of Life (Pedro Almodóvar, 2023)
Strange Way of Life is perhaps not as strange as its title might suggest, but for admirers of Pedro Almodóvar this half hour movie is still well worth watching.
After The Human Voice (2020, also 30 minutes), starring Tilda Swinton and a dog, this is the second English language film that Pedro Almodóvar has made.
Whether or not this means that at some point we will get an English feature by the great Spanish filmmaker I do not know… but I’ll keep my fingers crossed - even though he’s made so many masterpieces in Spanish he has nothing left to prove - my top three: Mujeres al borde de un ataque de "nervios" (1988), Todo Sobre Mi Madre (1999) and Dolor y gloria (2019).
Strange Way of Life features many of his usual trademarks, including a love for bizarre storylines, extravagant characters and colorful settings and designs.
And of course, there are some great actors as well. In this case Ethan Hawke and Pedro Pascal, as two former lovers who are reunited 25 years after the fact, when hitman Silva (Pascal) rides his horse across the desert to visit Jake (Hawke), who has become sheriff of his little town.
After spending the night together, the real reason of Silva’s visit is revealed. Which means that the two men might find themselves on opposing sides of a crime that Jake is trying to solve. Will justice be done or is this more a case of ‘let love rule’?
Strange Way of Life is Almodóvar’s first foray into the western genre, and yeah, there is a little bit of history there, as he was once offered the script of Brokeback Mountain, before Ang Lee came on board, and won a ton of awards with it, including three Oscars.
Apparently, Almodóvar declined because he couldn’t make the more explicit movie he had in mind. And yet, perhaps the strangest thing about Strange Way of Life, is that it’s surprisingly coy when it comes to the depiction of homosexuality, with the screen going to black after the main characters’ first real embrace.
That aside, Strange Way of Life very much looks and feels like an Almodovar film. It’s not quite on the level of his features - the backstory is mainly told through dialogue and is only made visual at a point where it doesn’t add much to the story anymore - but I’m still glad I caught it in a theater, where it screened for a reduced price as a stand alone film.
I actually wish this would happen more often. I enjoy a three hour epic as much as the next movie buff, but to mix things up I would also leave the house for more thirty or forty minute movies by the world’s top-tier filmmakers.
So here’s hoping that Strange Way of Life will start a trend in that direction, that would be both weird and wonderful.
Note: Strange Way Of Life had its world premiere at the most recent Cannes Film Festival. It has since been theatrically released in parts of Europe and South-America and it’s released this weekend in the United Kingdom, Ireland and Argentina, before coming to the United States in October.