Pedro Almodóvar’s short film, “Strange Way of Life” starring Pedro Pascal and Ethan Hawke, is now available for streaming on the MUBI platform.
Cowboys are in the spotlight! The western genre, with its whips and lassos, is revisited and corrected with Strange Way of Life.
Directed by acclaimed Spanish filmmaker Pedro Almodóvar, the short follows Silva (Pedro Pascal), a rancher who crosses the desert and heads to town with one intention: to reunite with his former love, Sheriff Jake (Ethan Hawke).
These two cowboys are not strangers: they have a common past as hitmen, they have a lot to remember. But beneath this joyful reunion hides an ulterior motive.
Silva and Sheriff Jake may want to rekindle the budding romance they’ve never been able to experience over the past 25 years, but the two cowboys are determined to get what they want. And it’s not necessarily the same thing.
We know that in westerns, cowboys are stereotypical: they are tough men, who ride horses and who are fiercely independent and autonomous. In Hollywood, we’ve seen them in timeless films like The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, starring Clint Eastwood as the Man With No Name.
If we think of iconic outlaw duos, there’s Paul Newman as Butch Cassidy and Robert Redford as the Sundance Kid in Butch Cassidy and the Kid.
But past films depicting the Wild West have rarely tackled LGBTQ+ themes, and even with more recent films like Brokeback Mountain, there’s still potential waiting to be explored.
It is precisely a response to Brokeback Mountain – which he was initially to direct – that Pedro Almodóvar offers with Strange Way of Life. Presented at Cannes last May, then released in theaters with The Almodóvar Experience last August, Strange Way of Life is now available for streaming on MUBI.
The platform, dedicated to auteur cinema, devotes an entire cycle to the Spanish director with Magnificent obsessions: the films of Pedro Almodóvara dive into the talented director’s first films which will begin on October 30.
In the program :
So head over to MUBI to discover Strange Way of Life and Almodóvar’s early works.