In 32 minutes, Pedro Almodóvar’s Strange Way of Life packs in more tenderness, eroticism and cinephile references than most feature films manage across a couple of hours. In his second foray into English language filmmaking after 2020’s The Human Voice, the international auteur takes on the most American and most macho of genres: the western. Balancing the contrasting sex appeals of Pedro Pascal and Ethan Hawke, Almodóvar imagines a lover’s reunion, lubricated by wine and memories of a youthful lust.
Almodóvar: The western is not a genre I discovered as a child. I remember children playing cowboys and Indians but I was never part of this. Once I arrived in Madrid, in my twenties, I became passionate about the genre. There are genres that I never discovered in my first youth – like film noir, thrillers, and the western – but I effusively embraced in my adulthood. So, the truth is that I’ve never thought about making a western, although the western is present in at least two of my films: (1954) in (1988), in the ‘Lie to me and tell me you’ve been waiting for me’ scene, which I think is one of the most beautiful pieces of dialogue ever written; and in (1985), the final scene of (1946) appears as a premonition to the main characters in my film. is also an exception in the genre as it’s a woman’s western, where Joan Crawford and Mercedes McCambridge wear the pants and the guns. The western is essentially a masculine and an American genre. It’s America inventing itself through cinema.
